Conventional outcomes report cards-- public disclosure of information about the patient-background-adjusted health outcomes of individual hospitals and physicians -- may help improve quality, but they may also encourage providers to "game" the system by avoiding sick and/or seeking healthy...

"In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tax preference for insurance on health spending based on the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996-2005. We use the fact that Social Security taxes are only levied on earnings below a statutory threshold to identify the tax preference's impact....