On March 12, 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Civic Federation held a forum on retiree health care for state and local government employees. The participants focused on strategies to finance and administer other post-employment benefits, or OPEB.

The clinically detailed risk information system for cost (CD-RISC) contains definitions for several hundred severity-adjusted conditions that can be used to predict future health care costs. We develop a prospective Medicare CD-RISC model using a 5-percent sample of Medicare beneficiaries and...

This paper considers the adoption of Health Information Technology (HIT) by physician clinics with ten or fewer physicians. The paper considers the theoretical economics literature on technology adoption for a new technology and has a place in the empirical tests of these models. The two major...

There has been an almost 60 percent increase in health care expenditures in the US in the past seven years. Employer-sponsored health coverage premiums have increased significantly (87 percent) in this same period. Besides the cost of care for chronic conditions such as migraine, arthritis and...

Employers throughout West Michigan continue to feel the crushing impact of rising healthcare costs. Nationally, year-over-year increases in health insurance premium costs have exceeded the overall inflation rate since 2000 by about a four-to-one margin. Figure 1-1 highlights the magnitude of...