This Article employs a behavioral economic analysis to understand why Medicaid has failed to improve the health outcomes of its beneficiaries. It begins with a formal economic model of health care consumption and then systematically incorporates a survey of psychosocial variables to formulate...

This paper compares the cost and quality incentive effects of cost reimbursement and prospective payment systems in the health industry when providers are altruistic. Providers' behavioral rule is governed by a desire to maximize a weighted sum of profit and consumers' health benefit. When...

Antitrust courts have shortchanged the economic analysis of buyer-side market power in health care. This failure derives to a surprising degree from a single judicial decision, then-Judge Stephen Breyer's 1984 opinion for the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Kartell v. Blue Shield of...

The questions addressed in this paper are related to access rules to primary care services and the potential for patient driven competition between GPs and specialists. Most of the literature on the performance of primary care has dealt with reforming payment schemes, little attention being paid...

We provide direct evidence on the effect of health insurance on health outcomes by examining the dramatic increases in the eligibility of pregnant women for the Medicaid program between 1979 and 1992. We find that the 30-percentage-point rise in Medicaid eligibility significantly lowered the...

Fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) is a leading mortality risk factor in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and many Asian countries. Current studies of PM2.5 mortality have been conducted at the national and provincial levels, or at the grid-based micro level, and report only the exposure...

Equity in health has to be distinguished from equity in access to health care, or equity in the distribution of health care resources. We take as a working definition of health for our purposes the number of quality adjusted life years that a person may expect to enjoy over his or her lifetime....

Medical cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is perhaps the most widely applied tool to guide policy decisions concerning the use of health care resources. This chapter first reviews the rationale for and common practice of medical cost-effectiveness analysis. It seeks to place CEA within a...

Reducing tobacco smoking is a global public health objective. The success of curbing smoking via public health and fiscal policies is ambivalent. In recent years, conventional tobacco control measures have been complemented in some jurisdictions by harm reduction policies. The objective of harm...