Growth in the number of days between an appointment request and the actual appointment reduces demand. Although such waiting times are relatively low in the US, current policy initiatives could cause them to increase. We estimate multiple-equation models of physician utilization and insurance...

Individual health outcomes differ greatly between neighborhoods, and recent research has begun to examine how neighborhood environment affects individual health. A common hypothesis is that the inequitable distribution of healthcare resources limits access to health care for individuals in...

Stand-alone outpatient prescription drug plans (PDPs), introduced in January 2006, have become the most popular source for coverage of outpatient prescription drugs under Medicare relative to other available Medicare plan types (e.g. Medicare Advantage drug plans). Using county-level enrollment...

The Medicare stand-alone prescription drug plan (PDP) came into existence in 2006 as part of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. It is the most popular plan type among Medicare drug plans and large numbers of plans are available to all beneficiaries. In this article we present the first...

The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 created several new types of private insurance plans within Medicare, starting in 2006. Some of these plan types previously did not exist in the commercial market and there was great uncertainty about their prospects. In this paper, we show that statistical...