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Health

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Health Economics

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Do Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Addictions And Deaths Related To Pain Killers?, David Powell, Rosalie Pacula, Mireille Jacobson Feb 2018

Do Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Addictions And Deaths Related To Pain Killers?, David Powell, Rosalie Pacula, Mireille Jacobson

David Powell

Recent work finds that medical marijuana laws reduce the daily doses filled for opioid analgesics among Medicare Part-D and Medicaid enrollees, as well as population-wide opioid overdose deaths. We replicate the result for opioid overdose deaths and explore the potential mechanism. The key feature of a medical marijuana law that facilitates a reduction in overdose death rates is a relatively liberal allowance for dispensaries.  As states have become more stringent in their regulation of dispensaries, the protective value generally has fallen. These findings suggest that broader access to medical marijuana facilitates substitution of marijuana for powerful and addictive opioids. 

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Disentangling Moral Hazard And Adverse Selection In Private Health Insurance, David Powell, Dana Goldman Dec 2015

Disentangling Moral Hazard And Adverse Selection In Private Health Insurance, David Powell, Dana Goldman

David Powell

Moral hazard and adverse selection create inefficiencies in private health insurance markets and understanding the relative importance of each factor is critical for policy.   We use claims data from a large firm which changed health insurance plan options to isolate moral hazard from plan selection.  Using an instrumental variables quantile regression approach, we estimate the differential causal impact of each health insurance plan on the entire distribution of medical expenditures.  We account for systematic sample attrition during the sample period by conditioning on a nonseparable sample selection adjustment.   Our estimates imply that 54% of the additional medical spending …

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Does Retirement Impact Health Care Utilization?, Norma Coe, Gema Zamarro Oct 2015

Does Retirement Impact Health Care Utilization?, Norma Coe, Gema Zamarro

Gema Zamarro

The objective of this paper is to estimate the causal effect of retirement on health care utilization. To do so, we use data from the 1992-2008 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the 2004-2006 waves of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).In particular, we estimate the causal impact of retirement on health care utilization as measured by: doctor visits, visits to a general practitioner, nights in the hospital, and preventative care use. This paper uses panel data and instrumental variable methods, exploiting variation in statutory retirement ages across countries, to estimate the causal …

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How Does Retirement Impact Health Behaviors? An International Comparison, Norma Coe, Gema Zamarro Sep 2015

How Does Retirement Impact Health Behaviors? An International Comparison, Norma Coe, Gema Zamarro

Gema Zamarro

Recent work has found that retirement may lead to improvements in health, although the literature has not yet reached a consensus. This could be due to actual differences in the relationship of interest between countries or due to methodological differences between studies. The first goal of this paper is to estimate the causal impact of retirement on self-reported health using consistent estimation techniques on three harmonized longitudinal data sets, representative of the United States, England, and continental Europe. Using panel data and instrumental variable methods exploiting variation in statutory retirement ages, this paper then estimates how retirement causally affects health …

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Access To Hospital Interpreter Services For Limited English Proficient Patients In New Jersey: A Statewide Evaluation, Glenn Flores, Sylvia Torres, Linda Holmes, Debbie Salas-Lopez, Mara Youdelman, Sandra Tomany-Korman Sep 2014

Access To Hospital Interpreter Services For Limited English Proficient Patients In New Jersey: A Statewide Evaluation, Glenn Flores, Sylvia Torres, Linda Holmes, Debbie Salas-Lopez, Mara Youdelman, Sandra Tomany-Korman

Debbie Salas-Lopez MD, MPH

CONTEXT/OBJECTIVES: We surveyed New Jersey (NJ) hospitals to assess current language services and identify policy recommendations on meeting limited English proficiency (LEP) patients' needs.

METHODS: Survey with 37 questions regarding hospital/patient features, interpreter services, and resources/policies needed to provide quality interpreter services.

RESULTS: Sixty-seven hospitals responded (55% response rate). Most NJ hospitals have no interpreter services department, 80% provide no staff training on working with interpreters, 31% lack multilingual signs, and 19% offer no written translation services. Only 3% of hospitals have full-time interpreters, a ratio of 1 interpreter:240,748 LEP NJ residents. Most hospitals stated third-party reimbursement for interpreters would …

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A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health, Titus Galama May 2011

A Theory Of Socioeconomic Disparities In Health, Titus Galama

Titus Galama

Detailed understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the substantial socioeconomic disparities in health is necessary to design policies effective in reducing those disparities. This requires a unifying theory of socioeconomic status and health, which is currently absent. This thesis in economics aims to develop, in several steps, a theoretical framework of disparities in health by socioeconomic status over the life cycle, using economic principles and founded in health capital theory. The first part of this thesis addresses several serious technical issues with life-cycle models of health, medical care, and socioeconomic status. The second part presents the theoretical framework.

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Grossman's Health Threshold And Retirement, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn, Raquel Fonseca, Pierre-Carl Michaud Dec 2008

Grossman's Health Threshold And Retirement, Titus Galama, Arie Kapteyn, Raquel Fonseca, Pierre-Carl Michaud

Titus Galama

We formulate a stylized structural model of health, wealth accumulation and retirement decisions building on the human capital framework of health provided by Grossman. We explicitly assume a functional form of the utility function and carefully account for initial conditions, which allow us to derive analytic solutions for the time paths of consumption, health, health investment, savings and retirement. We argue that the Grossman literature has been unnecessarily restrictive in assuming that health is always at Grossman’s “optimal” health level. Exploring the properties of corner solutions we find that advances in population health (health capital) can explain the paradox that …

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