To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an individual mandate. Relying on unique claims panel data from a large private insurer...

Standardization of complex products is touted as improving consumer decisions and intensifying price competition, but evidence on standardization is limited. We examine a natural experiment: the standardization of health insurance plans on the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange....

Prices negotiated between payers and providers affect a health insurance contract's value via enrollees' cost-sharing and self-insured employers' costs. However, price variation across payers is hard to observe. We measure negotiated prices for hospital-payer pairs in Massachusetts and...

In the health insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), each state is divided into a set number of geographic ``rating areas." The ACA mandates that an insurer price its health insurance plan uniformly in all counties within the same rating area, conditional on...

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to newly mandated portability requirements of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, German legislature made the...

We study a general screening model that encompasses a health insurance market in which consumers have multiple dimensions of private information and a price-setting insurer (e.g., a monopolist or a social planner) offers vertically differentiated contracts. We combine theory and empirics to...

We study Medicare's competitive bidding program (CBP) for durable medical equipment (DME). We exploit Medicare claims data to examine both prices and utilization, focusing on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices to treat sleep apnea. We find that spending falls by 47.2% percent...

Effectively designed market mechanisms may reduce growth in health care spending. In this paper, we study the impact of privatizing the delivery of Medicaid drug benefits on drug spending. Exploiting granular data that allow us to examine drug utilization, we find that drug spending would fall...

Medicare overbilling refers to the phenomenon that providers report more and/or higher-intensity service codes than actually delivered to receive higher Medicare reimbursement. We propose a novel and easy-to-implement approach to detect potential overbilling based on the hours worked implied by...

Governments contract with private firms to provide a wide range of services. While a large body of previous work has estimated the effects of that contracting, surprisingly little has investigated how those effects vary with the generosity of the contract. In this paper we examine this issue in...