Previous research on health and life insurers' financial investments has highlighted the tension between profit maximization and the public good. We ascertained health and life insurance firms' holdings in the fast food industry, an industry that is increasingly understood to negatively impact public health. Insurers own $1.88 billion of stock in the 5 leading fast food companies. We argue that...

One important motive for deregulating social health insurance is to encourage product innovation. For the first time, the cost savings achieved by non-US managed care plans that are attributable to product innovation are estimated, using a novel approach. Panel data from a major Swiss health insurer permits to infer health status, which can be used to predict health care expenditure. The econom...

background: in today's world, survival of any organization depends on its competitiveness and suitable decisions against environmental changes.  one of the effective methods in organizations is to use performance evaluation systems to determine weak points to be improved and strengths to be reinforced. performance evaluation and management not only help organizations to increase competitiveness...

Tothesurprise ofmany, inMarch, the legislatureofMarylandpassed2bills (http://bsun.md/1FIt4Um) that would amend an outdated health insurance mandate that excluded same-sex couples from coverage for in vitro fertilization treatments. Specifically, the 2 bills, proposed separately in theMarylandHouseandSenateand then amended to be identical, prohibit “insurers, nonprofit health service plans, and ...

The owners of a health insurance/managed care business may want to sell that business for a variety of reasons. Health care provider systems may want to exit that business due to operating losses, difficulty in complying with regulations, the inherent conflict in operating that business as part of a provider system, or the desire to focus on being a health care provider. Health insurers/HMOs ma...

In the 1990s states were particularly active in efforts to improve perceived inefficiencies in their non-group health insurance markets. Among the reforms that were implemented the strongest measure, which was adopted by several states, was community rating. Our goal is to identify the impact of community rating in state non-group insurance markets on 1) the decision to purchase non-group insur...

I use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers. I include a simple profit-maximization framework and an additional effect: hospitals that can secure demand without contracting with all insurers (e.g., those most attractive to consumers and those that are capacity constrained) may demand high...

Despite the popularity of pay-for-performance (P4P) among health policymakers and private insurers as a tool for improving quality of care, there is little empirical basis for its effectiveness. We use data from published performance reports of physician medical groups contracting with a large network HMO to compare clinical quality before and after the implementation of P4P, relative to a cont...