We estimate the effects of hospital competition on the level of and the variation in quality of care and hospital expenditures for elderly Medicare beneficiaries with heart attack. We compare competition's effects on more-severely ill patients, whom we assume value quality more highly, to the...

This paper identifies which types of patients and hospitals have abusive Medicare billings that are responsive to law enforcement. For a 20 percent random sample of elderly Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized from 1994-98 with one or more of six illnesses that are prone to abuse, we obtain...

We provide empirical evidence both on the causes and the effects of liability reforms. Using a newly collected data set of state tort laws and a panel data set containing industry-level data by state for the years 1969-1990, we (1) identify the characteristics of states that are associated with...

Medicare currently allows beneficiaries to choose between a government-run health plan and a privately- administered program known as Medicare Advantage (MA). Because enrollment in MA is optional, conventional observational estimates of the program's impact are potentially subject to selection...

Although economic theory suggests that the federal government can influence spending by states through subsidies to programs that states operate, no recent work has quantified the magnitude of this effect for Medicaid, the largest program of this type in the U.S. We find that Medicaid spending...

Understanding how and why liability laws and liability reforms alter the medical treatment decision-making process is central to reforming the current U.S. malpractice liability system. Survey methods serve a valuable role in this process because they measure how malpractice pressure affects...

Subsidies for health insurance for chronically ill, high-cost individuals may increase coverage in the broader population by improving the functioning of insurance markets. In this paper, we assess an historical example of a policy intervention of this sort, the extension of Medicare to the...

Although policymakers have increasingly turned to provider report cards as a tool to improve health care quality, existing studies provide mixed evidence that they influence consumer choices. We examine the effects of providing consumers with quality information in the context of fertility...