Technological advances in health care have been shown to yield large average health benefits for the U.S. elderly population. However, less is known about the marginal or incremental benefits of health care spending. We use geographical variations in health care spending to measure the marginal...

The Medicare program is now an important source of transfers to elderly and disabled beneficiaries, and will continue to grow rapidly in the future. Because the Medicare program is so large in magnitude, it can have significant redistributional effects. In this paper, we measure the flow of...

Medicare currently transfers roughly $200 billion annually to the elderly. The difference between Medicare expenditures flowing into the state and annual Medicare taxes leaving the state - both on an annual and a lifetime basis - varies widely across states. Lifetime Medicare transfers, defined...