States with Section 1332 Waivers to operate high-risk pools (HRPs) or reinsurance programs can receive federal pass through funds equal to reductions in federal expenditures generated by the Waiver. Shifting financial responsibility for high-cost individuals out of the Health Insurance Exchange...

This study examines whether Seguro Popular, a free-of-charge publicly provided health insurance program for otherwise uninsured households, crowded-out private transfers in Mexico. Using data from the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey, the effects of Seguro Popular are identified...

How do patient and provider incentives affect mode and cost of long-term care? Our analysis of 1 million nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

I exploit the age-based eligibility structure of Medicare and the age gap between spouses to examine the impact of Medicare eligibility of an older spouse on the insurance coverage of younger, Medicare-ineligible spouses. Using a regression discontinuity framework, I find that Medicare...

Many have argued that concerns over health insurance reduce labor market mobility in the United States, causing a “job lock” effect. We take advantage of the novel natural experiment created by the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate to estimate the magnitude of the job lock...

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance Exchanges. We begin by showing that Exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consumer types. A minority of consumers,...

Incomplete health insurance enrollment is a persistent U.S. challenge despite large subsidies. We ask whether hassles built into enrollment systems matter for insurance take-up and targeting. Studying removal of an auto-enrollment policy, we find that a small hassle - a requirement to actively...

Penalty mandates are used in many countries to encourage people to purchase health insurance. But are they effective? We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a step-wise age-based mandate, and whether this has...

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551 thousand nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

In theory, guaranteed renewable (GR) insurance contracts can efficiently protect individuals against reclassification risk without the negative side effects of price regulation, such as adverse selection. For these contracts to work properly, consumers must pay front-loaded premiums when healthy...