Scientists and investigators in such diverse fields as geological and environmental sciences, ecology, forestry, disease mapping, and economics often encounter spatially referenced data collected over a fixed set of locations with coordinates (latitude-longitude, Easting-Northing etc.) in a...

Prices set by fee-for-service Medicare have a direct effect on prices paid by private insurers throughout the health care system. While this link is widely recognized, there is disagreement about whether higher Medicare prices lead to lower or higher prices for private health insurance. We...

Publicly subsidized private health insurance markets in the United States were created under the assumption that competition would maximize consumer welfare. However, consumers in these markets are willing to pay thousands of dollars to stay in the same health plan, even after accounting for...

This paper considers some design features of a health care reform proposal that would make a government-run health insurance plan available to all. The details of any health care reform proposal are important, and the details of this proposal still are under development. However, some details...

ABSTRACT The concept of ‘value’ typically includes a combination of cost and quality measures. Some approaches to incorporating value into payment systems treat cost and quality as separate dimensions, but policymakers have expressed interest in a single scalar index that combines cost and...

Market-based health care reform proposals typically rely on 1) consumer choice among competing health plans, 2) premiums paid out-of-pocket for higher priced plans, and 3) a significant out- of-pocket premium-price elasticity of health plan choice. Section 125 of the Internal Revenue Code...

Prior studies have found that Medicare health maintenance organization (HMO) enrollees have lower mortality (over a fixed observation period) than beneficiaries in traditional fee-for‐service (FFS) Medicare. We use Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) data to compare 2‐year predicted...