Precision medicine or personalized medicine refers to the customization of medical treatment based on the ability to classify individuals into subpopulations that differ in susceptibility to a particular disease or in response to a specific treatment. This new perception about diagnosis and...

Low-income people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have limited access to healthcare when they are sick. To address this issue, the governments of LMICs have initiated health insurance programs that target these poor populations. However, the health benefits these programs provide are...

In the first two quarters of 2013 the Georgian government introduced and fully implemented a universal health care (UHC) plan covering all those not-yet publicly or privately insured. We estimate the effect of the introduction of the universal healthcare plan on the level of out-of-pocket (OOP)...

For the German statutory health insurance (SHI), the development of health spending and of the contribution relevant income is analyzed between 1996 and 2016 with respect to the relevant economic and demographic driving factors. The analysis allows identification and quantification of the main...

Understanding how health care utilization responds to cost-sharing incentives is of central importance for providing high quality care and limiting the growth of costs. While there is compelling evidence that patients react to financial incentives, it is less well understood how and why specific...

Many competitive health insurance markets adjust payments to participating health plans according to their enrollees’ risk – including based on diagnostic information. We investigate responses of German health plans to the introduction of morbidity-based risk adjustment in the Statutory...

Medicaid is a government program that also provides health insurance to the old who have little assets and either low income or catastrophic health care expenses. We ask how the Medicaid rules map into the reality of Medicaid recipiency and what other observable characteristics are important to...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of “innovating-by-doing,” whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners’ ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory research and...

Two ailments limit the effectiveness and threaten the long-term viability of the U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI). First, the program is ineffective in assisting the vast majority of workers with less severe disabilities to reach their employment potential or earn their...