Subsidies for health insurance for chronically ill, high-cost individuals may increase coverage in the broader population by improving the functioning of insurance markets. In this paper, we assess an historical example of a policy intervention of this sort, the extension of Medicare to the...

This paper presents the first national estimates of the effects of the SCHIP expansions on insurance coverage. Using CPS data on insurance coverage during the years 1996 through 2000, we estimate two-stage least squares regressions of insurance coverage. We find that SCHIP had a small, but...

Since 2012 the Congressional Budget Office has included an estimate of the market value of government-provided health insurance coverage in its measures of household income. We follow this practice for both public and private health insurance to capture the impact of greater access to...

Using premium subsidies for private coverage, an individual mandate, and Medicaid expansion, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has increased insurance coverage. We provide the first comprehensive assessment of these provisions' effects, using the 2012-2015 American Community Survey and a...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the...

The expansion of public insurance eligibility that occurred with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions may have spillover effects to other public assistance programs. We explore the impact of the ACA on two large safety net programs: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the...

Efforts to raise the productivity of the U.S. health care system have proceeded slowly. One potential explanation is the fragmentation of payment across insurers. Each insurer's efforts to improve care could influence how doctors practice medicine for other insurers, leading to unvalued...

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policymakers and private insurers as a tool for improving quality of care, there is little empirical basis for its effectiveness. We use data from published performance reports of physician medical groups contracting with a large...

Prices in government and employer-sponsored health insurance markets only partially reflect insurers' expected costs of coverage for different enrollees. This can create inefficient distortions when consumers self-select into plans. We develop a simple model to study this problem and estimate it...

Inequality in access to health care services, through private purchase, appears to pose policy challenges greater than inequality in other spheres. This paper explores how inequality in access to health care services relates to social welfare. I examine the sources of private demand for health...