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Conference Paper
The U.S. health care system and labor markets
This session will explore the impact of the U.S. health care system on U.S. labor markets. ; Why do employers believe that rising health care costs are a major cause for concern when economists insist that workers are the ones who actually bear the costs? What are the implications of large health care liabilities for the long-run viability of U.S. employers? How do rising health care costs affect employment and compensation decisions and labor mobility? Do behavioral insights shed any light on these issues?
Report
Reforming the U. S. health care system: where there's a will, there could be a way
The essay in the 2005 annual report summarizes the themes and consensus-based prescriptions for action that emerged from the Boston Fed's 50th economic conference, Wanting It All: The Challenge of Reforming the U.S. Health Care System, held in June 2005.
Conference Paper
Health financing: challenges and opportunities, coverage and cost
This policy panel will present and debate proposals for the next steps in reforming the U.S. health care system. Which challenge deserves the highest priority – providing universal access; instituting better measures of quality and outcomes and better management systems; or reining in costs? How should these challenges be addressed? What keeps us from "having it all"? Does the fundamental obstacle lie in market behavior, inadequate or asymmetric information, lack of political will, or the human psyche? How would the proposed reforms tackle the underlying issue and help us maintain a ...
Conference Paper
What is good care, and what is bad?
National health care goals generally include providing broad access to appropriate amounts of high-quality health care at appropriate cost to the ultimate payers. Yet all countries, regardless of how they deliver and finance health care, struggle to achieve a sustainable balance among the implicit tradeoffs. Does this struggle stem from the limited scope for competition in health care or from information asymmetries? Or does it simply reflect the inherent difficulty of measuring health care output and quality? Alternatively, does it result from deep-seated human behavior - a tendency for ...
Conference Paper
Will the United States continue to allocate a growing proportion of its GDP to health care?
What policy options would improve the access, efficiency, and quality shortcomings found in the current U.S. health care system? This session will address the efficacy of the available policy alternatives and their likely interactions. What, for instance, are the cost implications of providing better insurance coverage and encouraging ongoing scientific progress? How should these desirable objectives be financed? Can better measures of quality and outcomes and more effective management systems help to balance our health care goals?
Working Paper
Physician Payments Under Health Care Reform
This study assesses the impact of major health insurance reform in Massachusetts on the prices of services paid to physicians in the privately insured market. We estimate that the reform caused physician payments to increase at least 10.8 percentage points. This impact occurred while the legislation was materializing but before the final compromised version of the reform was enacted in April 2006. This finding is consistent with prices being set in a forward-looking manner, in anticipation of the reform. Overall, one-sixth of physician service price growth in Massachusetts between 2003 and ...
Working Paper
Equilibrium Labor Market Search and Health Insurance Reform
We present and empirically implement an equilibrium labor market search model where risk averse workers facing medical expenditure shocks are matched with firms making health insurance coverage decisions. Our model delivers a rich set of predictions that can account for a wide variety of phenomenon observed in the data including the correlations among firm sizes, wages, health insurance offering rates, turnover rates and workers? health compositions. We estimate our model by Generalized Method of Moments using a combination of micro datasets including Survey of Income and Program ...
Journal Article
Midlife Medicare : the case for reform heats up
Journal Article
Federal health care law promises coverage for all, but at a price
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as health care reform, was signed into law last March. The measure ostensibly provides health care coverage to almost all Americans while simultaneously reducing the deficit by $143 billion over 10 years and by a greater amount over the longer term.