Unlike most European countries, a majority of the population in Ireland pay out of pocket for a range of primary-care services, including general practitioner (GP) care. In 2017, the Committee on the Future of Healthcare published its final report (the Sláintecare Report; Houses of the...

Ein Kollaps der Krankenhäuser und insbesondere der Intensivstationen konnte während der Covid-19-Krise in den vergangenen zwei Jahren vermieden werden. Allerdings hat die Pandemie grundlegende Probleme des deutschen Gesundheitssystems offengelegt. Es war nicht auf die Krise vorbereitet:...

Vor mittlerweile mehr als 25 Jahren wurde mit Einführung des freien Krankenkassenwahlrechts die deutsche gesetzliche Krankenversicherung (GKV) in eine marktwirtschaftliche Ordnung überführt, in welcher gesetzliche Krankenkassen zueinander im Wettbewerb stehen. In Folge dessen hat eine...

Background: Pharmaceutical expenditure grow strongly in most health care systems. Especially high prices of new drugs are perceived to be driver of growth which might threaten the sustainability of financing drugs. Objective: The study aims to analyse a) whether German health policies can...

This paper estimates the monetary value of financial risk reduction associated with membership in Ghana's National Health Insurance Scheme, based on recent national household survey data. The paper compares the risk premiums for distributions of out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures with and...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented level of job losses in the U.S., where a job loss is also associated with the loss of health insurance. This paper uses data from the 2020 Household Pulse Survey (HPS) and difference-in-difference (DD) regressions to estimate the effect of the...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

The trade war initiated by the Trump administration is the largest since the US imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s and was still raging when he left office. We analyze how the trade war impacted the 2020 US Presidential election. Our results highlight the political salience of the...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

The Medicaid Home and Community- Based Services (HCBS) program in the United States subsidizes the long-term care provided at home or in community-based settings for older adults. Little is known about how HCBS affects the well-being of the aging population. Using detailed information about...

Der Risikostrukturausgleich (RSA) in der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (GKV) ist ein "lernendes System" - seit seiner Einführung durch das Gesundheitsstrukturgesetz (GSG) von 1992 ist er mehrfach umfassend reformiert worden. Das GKV-FKG von 2020 sieht vor, dass er regelmäßig auf...

Since at least the early 1990s, economists have found substantial evidence of "job lock" in the United States: workers who get health insurance from their employer are less likely to switch jobs. Early work showed stronger job lock among groups that place a higher value on health insurance,...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) introduced a premium tax credit to help low-income families purchase insurance and an individual mandate penalty to encourage purchasing insurance, but a couple’s total tax credit and mandate penalty may differ depending on whether they are married. We use a...

The Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) subsidizes long-term care to satisfy the increasing desire to age at home among older adults. The HCBS program may improve health outcomes of this population by allowing them to age-in-place, but less quality and quantity of home-based care...

Urban poor societies were a vulnerable group. Once they are sick, they fall deeper into poverty. National Health Insurance (NHI) is a way the government initiated to overcome this situation. We analyzed the factor related to NHI membership among urban poor societies. The study population...

Although a significant number of middle and low-income countries have expanded access to subsidized health insurance, it still is unclear whether these insurance expansions improve children's health, This paper exploits quasi-random variation from an insurance expansion targeted at poor...

More than 18 percent of U.S. adults met the diagnostic criteria for a mental illness. Yet, many who could benefit from mental health care do not receive any treatment, mostly due to the inability to pay for care or lack of health insurance coverage. How does a sudden change in health insurance...

More than 18 percent of U.S. adults met the diagnostic criteria for a mental illness. Yet, many who could benefit from mental health care do not receive any treatment, mostly due to the inability to pay for care or lack of health insurance coverage. How does a sudden change in health insurance...

We study the effect of health insurance expansion on nutrition-related children's health outcomes. We exploit quasi-random variation from an insurance expansion targeted at poor households in Peru. We find that access to insurance reduces childhood obesity and exerts positive and economically...

This paper exploits variation resulting from a series of federal and state Medicaid expansions between 1979 and 2014 to estimate the effects of child's access to public health insurance on labor market outcomes of parents. The results imply that extended Medicaid eligibility of children leads to...

Low-income people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have limited access to healthcare when they are sick. To address this issue, the governments of LMICs have initiated health insurance programs that target these poor populations. However, the health benefits these programs provide are...

A vast literature studies the behavioural impacts of health care reforms, often coming to controversial conclusions. Here we examine the time allocation effects of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obama Care, focusing on two ACA pillars: Medicaid expansion, which increased access to public...

Background: Despite the focus of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to bridge healthcare utilisation gap among women in Ghana, recent evidence indicates that most maternal deaths still occur from rural Ghana. The objective of this study was to examine the rural-urban differences in the...

Policymakers have historically attempted to influence quality in nursing homes through the imposition of minimum staffing standards (MSS) and through the public dissemination of quality on websites like Care Compare. Current Federal MSS require a registered nurse (RN) on duty for at least eight...

We calculate conservative estimates for the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) associated with providing Medicaid to inmates exiting prison. Our MVPF estimates, which measure the ratio between the benefits associated with the policy (measured in terms of willingness to pay) and its costs net...

We explore the role of the largest non-food support safety net program, Medicaid, on multiple measures of food hardship among households with children, including measures that capture hardship explicitly experienced by children. Using data from the 2001-2020 waves of the December Current...

We study the impact of the world's largest publicly funded health insurance plan for the poor on credit markets. India launched a health insurance plan that covered 500 million beneficiaries. The fact that opposition-ruled states did not implement the program due to political reasons allows us...

Using information from the all-payer claims database for Rhode Island covering more than three-quarters of health insurance enrollees in the state from April 2011 through May 2019, this paper offers new measures of the association between the Medicaid expansion and the rate of receipt of...

This paper studies how publicly-financed health insurance can become counter-productive, ushering in unnecessary medical procedures with unintended health consequences. Using the fourth round of the National Family Health Survey, we show how a state-sponsored health insurance program providing...