Background: Public providers in Jordan are facing increasing health demands due to human crises. This study aimed to benchmark the unit costs of hospital services in public providers in Jordan to provide insights into the outlook for public health care costs. Methods: The unit costs of hospital...

We study how competition between physicians affects the provision of medical care. In our theoretical model physicians are faced with a heterogeneous patient population, in which patients systematically vary with regard to both, their responsiveness to the provided quality of care and their...

Background: Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) is a global priority and a keystone element of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, COVID-19 is causing serious impacts on tax revenue and many countries are facing constraints to new investment in health. To advance UHC progress,...

In 2019, the Bolivian government began implementation of the Universal Health Insurance (SUS) scheme, with critics claiming the unpreparedness of the healthcare system to provide universal and free services. To date, there is no research that assesses the effects of the reform and to what extent...

Rural households in developing countries have limited capacity to cope with and manage shocks, thereby resulting in chronic poverty, indebtedness, and a decline in overall well-being. Therefore, this study analyzes the effects of health shocks on overindebtedness in rural Viet Nam using four...

Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) is a top global priority, and nutrition actions are a critical part of meeting that goal. When delivered within key windows of opportunity to improve health throughout the life-course, essential nutrition actions play an important role in reducing the...

This paper presents evidence on how firms react to a more generous insurance against high sick pay costs. We exploit a reform launched in Sweden in 2015, which introduced different thresholds for insurance reimbursement depending on firm size. By comparing workers in smaller firms with workers...

Competition in health insurance markets may fail to improve health outcomes if consumers are not willing to pay for high quality plans. We document large differences in the mortality rates of Medicare Advantage (MA) plans within local markets. We then show that when high (low) mortality plans...

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...

Low rates of health insurance coverage among the non-employed have motivated consideration of policies to subsidize the purchase of insurance for those who are without a job. But there is little evidence on the extent to which coverage differentials between the employed and the non-employed...

A literature has found that medical providers inflate bills and report more conditions given financial incentives. We evaluate whether Medicare reimbursement incentives are driven more by bill inflation or coding costs. Medicare reformed its payment mechanism for inpatient hospitalizations in...

Implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been linked to an increase in the population covered by health insurance through expansions of the Medicaid program and revisions to private health insurance markets. We add to the body of literature on unintended consequences of the ACA by...

When women of childbearing age gain health insurance, we expect their birth outcomes to improve, but comparing births that occur before and after policy changes may confound two separate impacts of coverage. For one, health insurance could affect who gives birth, through reduced costs of...

Latinos in the U.S. are the least likely to have health insurance compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Mexican Americans, the largest subgroup of U.S. Latinos, have particularly great barriers to healthcare access, and experience disparities in care and in health outcomes. The Affordable...

Examining the impact of basic medical insurance integration on households’ welfare is essential for finding policy solutions for health and welfare inequality. Based on the various implementation time of the urban-rural medical insurance integration in different prefectural cities of China, we...

A promising new model for the employee health plans of large firms bypasses insurers, instead using direct contracts with hospitals which have been designated as centers of excellence. The authors describe how combining this model with cutting edge analytics could revolutionize the delivery of...

In 2019, almost half of Americans received health insurance through an employer. In theory, employees learn about their benefits through a benefits summary called a summary plan description—an SPD. . . .The SPD is supposed to work for Americans, even those with low health literacy. . . ....

Not everyone makes wise financial choices. A large body of research documents behavior inconsistent with well-informed consumers maximizing their expected utility of consumption. It remains unknown, however, whether such behavior is correlated across domains. This paper uses two novel datasets...

We conduct a randomized experiment that varies one-time health insurance subsidy amounts (partial and full) in Ghana to study the impacts of subsidies on insurance enrollment and health care utilization. We find that both partial and full subsidies promote insurance enrollment in the long run,...

Penalty mandates are used in many countries to encourage people to purchase health insurance. But are they effective? We use a large administrative dataset for a 10% random sample of all Australian tax-filers to study how people respond to a stepwise age-based mandate, and whether the effect has...

Early initiation of anti-osteoporosis medications (AOMs) is recommended for patients on long-term glucocorticoid (GC) therapy. This study aimed to examine whether physicians prescribe AOMs as soon as GC therapy is initiated, and whether a delay in AOM initiation affects hip and vertebral...

We use the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to estimate a model of household demand for employer-based health insurance, explicitly investigating differences in behavior between households with two potential sources of coverage and those with one source. Own and cross-price elasticities are...

This paper studies an individual's responsiveness to the outpatient utilization under a nonlinear health insurance contract. Specifically, we aim to investigate how a change of the shadow price of medical services would affect an individual's doctor-visit probability given all the history...

We estimate the impact of employer-provided health insurance (EPHI) on the job mobility of males over time using a dynamic empirical model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity. Previous studies of job-lock reach different conclusions about possible distortions in labor mobility stemming...

Costly new technology, while often beneficial, has been identified as the principal driver of healthcare spending growth. Recent literature has shown high deductible health plans (HDHP) can have an immediate impact on levels of healthcare spending, but their medium and long run effects on...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aims to mitigate Americans’ uninsured crisis by expanding Medicaid and establishing the ACA Marketplace. The Medicaid expansion has a profound impact on Marketplace plan premiums. On the one hand, it lowers the premiums because the expansion drives out the people...

We studied the impact of Affordable Care Act navigator programs on health insurance coverage, using the 80% cut in program funding under the Trump administration as a natural experiment. Our study design exploited county-level differences in the navigator program prior to funding cuts. We did...

This paper explores the level and dispersion of premiums paid for individual health insurance by comparing asking price' data posted on an electronic insurance exchange with survey data on premiums actually paid in the period just before the advent of electronic exchanges. The primary...

This paper analyzes the determinants of health insurance enrollment and health expenditure in Ghana using micro data from wave 7 of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 7) with emphasis on the role of risk preferences and the availability of health facilities in one’s own community, neither...

This paper studies the effect of provision of information by the government and private firms through marketing activities in the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace. Using detailed TV advertising data, we present evidence that government advertising and private advertising target...

While National Health Insurance (NHI) plans in the U.S. are often opposed on the basis of their potential disemployment effects, there is no existing evidence on the effects of NHI on employment. We provide such evidence by examining the employment consequences of NHI in Canada, using the fact...

This paper examines the role of employer provided health insurance in the retirement decisions of dual working couples. The near elderly have high-expected medical expenditures; therefore, availability of health insurance is an important factor in their retirement decisions. We determine if...

A large body of research documents that the 2010 dependent coverage mandate of the Affordable Care Act was responsible for significantly increasing health insurance coverage among young adults. No prior research has examined whether sexual minority young adults also benefitted from the dependent...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an explosion in demand for telemedicine and with it myriad new, untested telemedicine policies. We isolate the impact of a policy which selectively removed cost-sharing for telemedicine services from April-September 2020, estimating changes in telemedicine...

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...

Health Insurance business in India has witnessed a steady growth since 2013-14 with an annual average growth rate of around 20 percent. It indicates the role and relevance of prevailing marketing practices though a long way to go. Hence, it becomes essential to present and analyze the...

I look at prevention through an economic lens and make three main points. First, those advocating preventive measures are often asked how much money a given measure saves. This question is misguided. Rather preventive measures can be thought of as insurance, with a certain cost in the present...

Recent empirical studies have shown that ownership by large institutional investors of a partial stake in multiple publicly traded firms within an industry, may lead to anti-competitive behavior. This is because the common owner wants to maximize its portfolio’s return and not the return from...

We provide new insights into the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. Using nonparametric causal machine learning methods, we find economically meaningful treatment effect heterogeneity in the impact of Medicaid coverage on ED use. The effect...

We examine whether the decline in the availability of employer-provided health insurance is a phenomenon common to all jobs or is concentrated only on certain jobs. In particular, we investigate the extent to which employers have continued to provide health insurance on what we term reducing the...

Typically, health insurance premiums depend at least in part on the previous costs of the insuring firm, a factor termed 'experience rating'. This link between health status and future premiums raises concerns of market failure, since it limits the ability of firms to insure the price at which...

Over the last two decades, employers have increasingly offered workers a choice of health plans. The availability of choice has the potentially beneficial effects of lowering the cost and increasing the quality of health care through greater competition among health plans for enrollees as well...