The Affordable Care Act greatly expanded subsidized health insurance opportunities for low-income childless women through Medicaid and the Marketplace. This insurance provides better access to prescription-based contraception, which could reduce the number of births. At the same time, it lowers...

The planning practice of health care capacities suffers from sectoral and regional constraints and it remains difficult to ensure an equal access for patients. Moreover, standard planning approaches lack the choice-theoretic grounding necessary for making reliable predictions of the demand and...

This paper explores the fungibility between earmarked local option sales taxes and general revenue. We predict that as the adjustment costs to the budget grow, there will be less compensation from general revenue. We use national county level data from 1983 to 2004 to examine the effects of...

Social health insurance systems can be designed with different levels of state involvement and varying degrees of redistribution. In this article we focus on citizens’ preferences regarding the design of their health insurance coverage including the extent of redistribution. Using a...

Scholars and policymakers across the ideological spectrum agree that the U.S. drug pricing system is deeply flawed. Most reform proposals focus on one symptom: high prices for existing drugs. But high prices aren’t all that ails the U.S. drug pricing system: Current law also provides weak...

Risk adjustment is a common policy for mitigating the effects of adverse selection when government regulation limits insurer ability to rate consumers according to their expected risks. I study the social welfare implications of risk adjustment. I first show theoretically that risk adjustment...

We explore the effects that optimism bias has on the demand for insurance. Our theory is based on a simple binomial model of the demand for insurance in which consumers make optimistically biased assessments concerning the likelihood of future outcomes. From this model, we derive an insurance...

How do patient and provider incentives affect mode and cost of long-term care? Our analysis of 1 million nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

When public long-term care (LTC) insurance is provided by insurers, they typically lack incentives for purchasing cost-effective LTC. Providing insurers with appropriate incentives for efficiency without jeopardizing access for high-risk individuals requires, among other things, an adequate...

This research uses the input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to examine the efficiency of the U.S. health insurers. It shows that more insurers are less efficient than the previous sample year; however, the results suggest that the federal health care reform have no significant...