The Affordable Care Act’s subsidies enable seven million Americans to purchase zero-premium insurance plans. Millions more are eligible for generously subsidized health plans with small, positive premiums. What difference does a premium of zero make, relative to a slightly positive premium?...

Leveraging the random assignment of over 50,000 Medicaid enrollees in New York, I present causal evidence that narrow networks are a blunt instrument for reducing health care spending. While narrower networks constrain spending, they do so by generating hassle costs that reduce quantity, with...

This chapter 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...

Cost-effectiveness analysis is versatile and used widely to assist in health care decision making. This chapter discusses how cost-effectiveness analysis is used at the system or national level, particularly in the domain of coverage and payment policy. We describe its relationship to other...

There are widespread differences in health care spending and utilization across regions of the US as well as in other countries. Are these variations caused by demand-side factors such as patient preferences, health status, income, or access? Or are they caused by supply-side factors such as...

Health care spending has increased faster than incomes for decades, but the pace slowed materially after the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Using data from various waves of the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey we examine what has happened to out-of-pocket health care spending by...

We study the impact of product margins on pharmacies' incentive to promote generics instead of brand-names. First, we construct a theoretical model where pharmacies can persuade patients with a brand-name prescription to purchase a generic version instead. We show that pharmacies' substitution...

After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country's GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times what it...

This paper is primarily concerned with estimating an upper bound for the contribution of technological progress on health care costs as motivated by the recent debate on U.S. health care reform. We critically address whether technology is at least 50% of the increase in health care costs as...