We seek to explain why countries have adopted national Old-Age Insurance and Health Insurance programs. Theoretical work has posited several factors that could lead to this adoption: the strain from expanding capitalism; the need for political legitimacy; the desire to transfer to similar people;...

Proposals to create a national health care plan such as “Medicare for All” rely heavily on reducing the prices that insurers pay for health care. These changes affect physicians’ short-run incentives for care provision and may also change health care providers’ incentives to invest in...

Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) represent the nation’s largest initiative of Medicare alternative payment models toward value and health outcomes. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) have tested various ACO models with differential risk structures, and have issued...

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 the United States, most labor force participants have health insurance plans sponsored and subsidized by their employers. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) improved and expanded the availability of non-employer-based health insurance, with protections for pre-existing conditions, guaranteed...

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...

This paper examines the extent to which government programs should monitor for wasteful expenditure when outsourcing to third parties, taking into account the costs and savings associated with monitoring. I use novel administrative data to study the largest Medicare monitoring program aimed at...

The United States spends substantially more on health care than most developed countries, yet leaves a greater share of the population uninsured. We suggest that incremental insurance expansions focused on addressing market failures will propagate inefficiencies and are not likely to facilitate...

Health plans for the poor increasingly limit access to specialty hospitals. We investigate the role of adverse selection in generating this equilibrium among private plans in Medicaid. Studying a network change, we find that covering a top cancer hospital causes severe adverse selection,...

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,...