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...

This paper summarizes the many aspects of public policy for health care. I first consider government policy affecting individual behaviors. Government intervention to change individual actions such as smoking and drinking is frequently justified on externality grounds. External costs of smoking...

We use a combination of administrative and survey data to estimate the fraction of individuals newly enrolled in public health coverage (Wisconsin's combined Medicaid and CHIP program) that had access to private, employer-sponsored health insurance at the time of their enrollment and the...

We examine how health insurance expansions affect the entry and location decisions of health care clinics. Exploiting county-level changes in insurance coverage following the Affordable Care Act and 1,721 retail clinic entries and exits, we find that local increases in insurance coverage do not...

This paper investigates the impact of Medicare HMO penetration on the medical care expenditures incurred by Medicare fee-for-service enrollees. We find that increasing penetration leads to reduced health care spending on fee-for-service beneficiaries. In particular, a one percentage point...

Doctors and hospitals in the United States serve patients covered by many types of insurance. This overlap in the supply of health care services means that changes in the prices paid or the volume of services demanded by one group of patients may affect other patient groups. This paper examines...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...