Medicaid is a government program that provides health insurance to the old who are sick and have little assets and income compared to their medical needs. Thus, it explicitly tests for income, assets, and health or medical needs to determine eligibility. We ask how these rules map into the...

We study the consequences of hospital competition for Medicare beneficiaries' heart attack care from 1985 to 1994. We examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets, and how hospital competition...

Motivated by widely publicized concerns that there are quot;too manyquot; plans, we structurally estimate (and validate) an equilibrium model of the Medicare Part D market to study the welfare impacts of two feasible, similar-sized approaches for reducing choice. One reduces the maximum number...

We study the impact of the introduction of one of the major pillars of the social insurance system in the United States: the introduction of Medicare in 1965. Our results suggest that, in its first 10 years, the establishment of universal health insurance for the elderly had no discernible...

The Medicare program is now an important source of transfers to elderly and disabled beneficiaries, and will continue to grow rapidly in the future. Because the Medicare program is so large in magnitude, it can have significant redistributional effects. In this paper, we measure the flow of...

Motivated by widely publicized concerns that there are "too many" plans, we structurally estimate (and validate) an equilibrium model of the Medicare Part D market to study the welfare impacts of two feasible, similar-sized approaches for reducing choice. One reduces the maximum number of firm...

We investigate the effect of universal health insurance on health outcome and the use of health services by exploiting a natural experiment that changes the insurance status of most Americans at age 65; that is, eligibility for the U.S. Medicare program. We compare inequalities in health and...

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...