Patients rely on medical care providers to act in their best interests because providers understand disease pathology and appropriate treatment much better than patients. Providers, however, not only give advice (diagnose) but also deliver (sell) treatments based on that advice. This creates a...

Can information about the value of diagnostic tests improve provider practice and help patients recognize higher quality of care? In a randomized experiment at public clinics in Mali, health providers and patients received tailored information about the importance of rapid diagnostic tests...

Since the inception of Medicare Part D in 2006, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and regulatory changes have led to increased concentration and reduced plan variety in the standalone prescription drug plan (PDP) portion of the market. We examine how this industry consolidation affects Medicare...

Health plan payment systems with community-rated premiums typically include risk adjustment, risk sharing or both to compensate insurers for predictable profits (on young and healthy people) and predictable losses (on the elderly and chronically ill). This paper shows how a payment system based...

Opioid overdose deaths in older adults have increased substantially over the past two decades. This increase has occurred despite the availability of effective treatments. Methadone, one of just three medications approved by the Food & Drug Administration for opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment,...

Moral hazard and provider-induced demand may contribute to overutilization of scarce health care resources. The U.S. health care system includes several compensatory cost-containment mechanisms, but their effects depend on how patients and providers respond. We investigate hospice programs'...

We study the role of physicians in driving geographic variation of US healthcare utilization. We estimate a model that separates variation in average utilization of Medicare beneficiaries due to physicians, non-physician supply side factors, and patient demand. The model is identified by...

Health insurers often tie payments to providers' quality of care. Although payers do this to elicit more effort from providers, some providers may game the system by avoiding patients who would cause their quality scores to fall. We use annual variation in the criteria for Medicare's Quality...

We report results from the first randomization of a regulatory reform in the health sector. The reform established minimum quality standards for patient safety, an issue that has become increasingly salient following the Ebola and COVID-19 epidemics. In our experiment, all 1348 health facilities...

Despite the growing need for surrogate decision-making for older adults, little is known about how surrogates make decisions and whether advance directives would change decision-making. We conducted a nationally representative experimental survey that cross-randomized cognitive impairment,...