I take advantage of regulatory and pricing dynamics in Medicare Part D to empirically explore interactions among adverse selection, switching costs, and regulation. I first document novel evidence of adverse selection and switching costs within Part D using detailed administrative data. I then...

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...

Individuals' medical spending has both necessary and discretionary components which are not, however, separately observable. This paper studies ways to improve upon existing public health insurance policies by using a framework where both the discretionary and necessary components of medical...

This paper studies a market for a medical product in which there is perfect competition among health insurers, while the good is sold by a monopolist. Individuals differ in their severity of illness and there is ex post moral hazard. We consider two regimes: one in which insurers use coinsurance...

Not a single COVID-19 crisis standard of care allocation plan suggests that life-saving critical care resources should go first to those able to pay or to the oldest in need. Yet, every day we ration healthcare in the United States, and with limited exceptions, care is rationed based on ability...

In December 2020, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a comprehensive report analyzing the costs of a single-payer healthcare system of the kind usually referred to as “Medicare for All” (M4A). The report has not yet received as much public attention as it deserves, most likely...

This comment provides a critical assessment of Frimpong et al. "Impact of the 1115 Behavioral Health Medicaid Waiver on Adult Medicaid Beneficiaries in New York State," published in Health Services Research (2021) [DOI: 10.1111/1475-6773.13657]. The authors reported a decline in inpatient...

This paper studies a market for a medical product in which there is perfect competition among health insurers, while the good is sold by a monopolist. Individuals differ in their severity of illness and there is ex post moral hazard. We consider two regimes: one in which insurers use coinsurance...

Innovation is part idea generation and part development. We build a model of “innovating-bydoing,” whereby ideas come to practitioners. Successful innovation requires that practitioners’ideas be developed through costly effort. Our model nests existing theories of laboratory researchand...

We use the design of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit program to demonstrate three facts about the health consequences of cost-sharing. First, we show that an as-if-random increase of 33.6% in out-of-pocket price (11.0 percentage points (p.p.) change in coinsurance, or $10.40 per drug)...