By 1993, over 70 of all Americans with health insurance were enrolled in some form of managed care plan. The term managed care encompasses a diverse array of institutional arrangements, which combine various sets of mechanisms, that, in turn, have changed over time. The chapter reviews these...

This chapter summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of...

In a model where patients face budget constraints that make some treatments unaffordable, we ask which treatments should be covered by universal basic insurance and which by private voluntary insurance. We argue that both cost effectiveness and prevalence are important if the government wants to...

This article presents a model of the important health-policy dilemmas of risk selection and moral hazard. When providers can increase revenues by selecting favorable risks, capitation or purely prospective payment is unlikely to be optimal. A second best payment system may involve mixed levels...