On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept into Louisiana and New Orleans, a city built largely on land reclaimed from swamp, witnessed massive failures in its levees. Much of the city and its surrounding suburbs were inundated; those residents of the city who had not heeded warnings to flee the...

A central controversy in the debate about Medicare is whether the program spends too much money or whether instead it should be expanded to cover more. I consider the value of increased Medicare spending. I argue that on average Medicare spending is worth it: the health gains brought by medicare...

There are four rationales for health care reform: increasing the efficiency of health delivery; reforming the market for health insurance; providing universal coverage; and reducing the federal deficit. These goals are reflected in most reform proposals. Achieving these goals involves several...

President Nixon declared what came to be known as the "war on cancer" in 1971 in his State of the Union address. At first the war on cancer went poorly: despite a substantial increase in resources, age-adjusted cancer mortality increased by 8 percent between 1971 and 1990, twice the increase...

Male life expectancy at birth fell by over six years in Russia between 1989 and 1994. Many other countries of the former Soviet Union saw similar declines, and female life expectancy fell as well. Using cross-country and Russian household survey data, we assess six possible explanations for this...

Americans have become considerably more obese over the past 25 years. This increase is primarily the result of consuming more calories. The increase in food consumption is itself the result of technological innovations which made it possible for food to be mass prepared far from the point of...

This paper draws on international evidence on medical spending to examine what the United States can learn about making its healthcare system more efficient. We focus primarily on understanding contemporaneous differences in the level of spending, generally from the 2000s. Medical spending...