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...

Stand-alone outpatient prescription drug plans (PDPs), introduced in January 2006, have become the most popular source for coverage of outpatient prescription drugs under Medicare relative to other available Medicare plan types (e.g. Medicare Advantage drug plans). Using county-level enrollment...

The Medicare stand-alone prescription drug plan (PDP) came into existence in 2006 as part of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. It is the most popular plan type among Medicare drug plans and large numbers of plans are available to all beneficiaries. In this article we present the first...

This paper presents a theoretical framework to predict the effects that may arise from mergers in the rapidly-growing Medicare HMO market. We argue that mergers of large Medicare HMOs should be targeted for antitrust investigation because there are significant barriers into this market. The...

Excess demand is a pervasive feature of health care systems that use global budgets to pay for hospital care, regardless of the amount of money spent by those systems. This paper presents a theory that explains this feature of global budgets. The theory emphasizes that hospital administrators...

This paper analyzes the welfare economics of three arrangements for purchasing health insurance: competitive markets in which consumers are free to choose among options with different levels of coverage and prices; systems with compulsory partial pooling which permit private firms to sell...