The theory of the second best implies that policymakers should address all relevant issues in a comprehensive manner to improve social welfare. Since most components in the economy are interconnected, a policy focusing narrowly on particular aspects of a broad issue often produces serious side...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

In 2006, the state of Massachusetts sanctioned the individual health insurance mandate and the expansion of health insurance coverage through Healthcare Reform Law. I design a quasi-experimental study using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey data sets from 2005 through...

In many markets insurers are barred from price discrimination based on con- sumer characteristics like age, gender, and medical history. In this paper, I build on a recent literature to show why such policies are inefficient if consumers differ in their willingness-to-pay for insurance...

Incomplete health insurance enrollment is a persistent U.S. challenge despite large subsidies. We ask whether hassles built into enrollment systems matter for insurance take-up and targeting. Studying removal of an auto-enrollment policy, we find that a small hassle - a requirement to actively...

The pharmaceutical market has experienced a massive wave of vertical integration between pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and health insurers in recent years. Using a unique dataset on insurer-PBM contracts, we document increasing vertical integration in Medicare Part D-vertically integrated...

This chapter presents an overview of the US health insurance market, reviews health insurance research literature, and examines premiums, medical expenses, medical service utilization, and data envelopment analysis (DEA) efficiency measures of health insurers from different perspectives. Results...

This paper focuses on the question: Does public or private control of health care lead to greater healthcare system efficiency? The data analysis demonstrates a curvilinear relationship between government control over health care and health care system inefficiency and that, as a result, a...