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...

This paper estimates a model of commercial HMO premiums based on Nash's axiomatic approach to bargaining between HMOs and employers. The bargaining models incorporate variables that measure the 'power' of the parties to affect the division of potential gains from a contract. It is found that an...

Antitrust advocates believe that horizontal consolidation in hospital markets can reduce competition and increase prices while merger advocates believe it can benefit consumers by reducing service duplication. This study analyzed the market conditions, operating characteristics, and costs and...

This paper proposes that an employer's choice of self-insurance vs. purchased health insurance can be explained by a trade-off between administrator moral hazard, the incentive for third-party administrators to be inefficient managers of self-insured employers’ medical claims and employer...

We estimate the price elasticity of prescription drug use in Medicare Part D, which features a non-linear price schedule due to a coverage gap. We analyze patterns of drug utilization prior to the coverage gap, where the “effective price” is higher than the actual copayment for drugs because...