Treatment is highly cost-effective in reducing an individual's substance abuse (SA) and associated harms. However, data from Treatment Episodes (TEDS) indicate that per capita treatment admissions substantially lagged behind increases in heavy drug use from 1992-2007. Only ten percent of...

Under the Affordable Care Act, individual states have discretion in how they define coverage regions, within which insurers must charge the same premium to buyers of the same age, family structure, and smoking status. We exploit variation in these definitions to investigate whether the size of...

This paper investigates the rise in shortages of sterile injectable pharmaceutical drugs in the US. I examine a policy change in 2005 that differentially reduced Medicare Part B payments for pharmaceuticals. Drugs whose payments dropped more due to the policy change have had greater increases in...

Economic theory predicts that employer-provided retiree health insurance benefits crowd-out household wealth accumulation. Nevertheless, there is little research on the impacts of retiree health insurance on wealth accruals, so this paper utilizes a unique data file on three baseline cohorts...

A large and growing number of adults are covered by public insurance, and the Affordable Care Act is predicted to dramatically increase public coverage over the next several years. This study evaluates how such large increases in public coverage affect provider behavior and patient wait times by...

There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in health care expenditures. We use vignettes from patient and physician surveys linked to Medicare expenditures at the Hospital Referral Region to test whether patient demand-side factors or physician supply-side factors...

I use the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance market to examine the dynamics of firm interaction with consumers on an insurance exchange. Enrollment data show that consumers face switching frictions leading to inertia in plan choice, and a regression discontinuity design indicates...

This paper studies regulated health insurance markets known as exchanges, motivated by their inclusion in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We use detailed health plan choice and utilization data to model individual-level projected health risk and risk preferences. We combine the estimated joint...

We estimate a bargaining model of competition between hospitals and managed care organizations (MCOs) and use the estimates to evaluate the effects of hospital mergers. We find that MCO bargaining restrains hospital prices significantly. The model demonstrates the potential impact of coinsurance...

The impacts of choice in public services are controversial. We exploit a reform in the English National Health Service to assess the impact of relaxing constraints on patient choice. We estimate a demand model to evaluate whether increased choice increased demand elasticity faced by hospitals...