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