BACKGROUND Thirteen percent of Latinos in Massachusetts lack health insurance, the highest rate of any ethnic or racial group. Families without health insurance are more likely to be in poor or fair health, to lack a regular medical provider, and to not have visited a medical provider in the past year. CONTEXT The Latino Health Insurance Program is designed as a response both to the high rate...

PURPOSE Medicare's merit-based incentive payment system and narrowing of physician networks by health insurers will stoke clinicians' and policy makers' interest in care delivery attributes associated with value as defined by payers. METHODS To help define these attributes, we analyzed 2009 to 2011 commercial health insurance claims data for more than 40 million preferred provider organizatio...

The economic overhaul of health care in America is restructuring the business of medicine, and with it the relationship between physician and patient. Previously accustomed to thinking primarily about the best interests of each patient, the physician now finds this traditional loyalty in conflict with competing concerns, including those of government, business, and insurers who watch with alarm...

Haruko Noguchi and Takashi Oshio for their comments. We also thank to Kaigo Roudou Antei Center for providing us valuable data. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those of the Economic and Social Research Institute or of the Japanese government. Abstract This paper evaluates the quality and efficiency of the at-home long-term care market in Japan, a market in which f...

Th e r e i s l i t t l e e v i d e n c e o f a n y r e l a t i o n , either positive or negative, between competition and the quality of medical care, and the existing data amount to even less than an examination of the literature on the topic would suggest. For want of data, analysts often use HMO market shares or, more recently, increased “managed care” shares as a proxy for market competitio...

The economics of small group insurance makes offering health benefits to employees a risky business. Surveys of employers from 1989 to 2003 reveal that more rapid premium increases are forcing small firms to impose higher cost-sharing. In 2003, premiums for small firms (3-199 workers) increased 15.5 percent, outpacing the 13.2 percent increase for large firms (200+ workers). From 2000 to 2003, ...

This study provided a national profile of health insurance of certain vulnerable populations including children, racial/ethnic minorities, low-income families, non-metropolitan statistical area (MSA) residents, and those with poor health status. The study shows an increase in the proportion of uninsured nonelderly population. While public insurance helped reduce the employment- and health-relat...

A key issue in the decades-long struggle over US health care spending is how to distribute liability for expenses across all market participants, from insurers to providers. The rise and abandonment in the 1990s of capitation payments-lump-sum, per person payments to health care providers to provide all care for a specified individual or group-offers a stark example of how difficult it is for p...