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This paper examines optimal regulatory testing requirements when new product quality is uncertain but market participants may learn over time. We develop a model capturing the regulator's tradeoff between consumer risk exposure and access to innovation. Using new data and exogenous variation between EU and US medical device regulatory rules, we document patterns consistent with our model and estimate its parameters. We find: without information from regulatory testing, risk shuts down the market; US policy is close to the one that maximizes a measure of welfare derived from our theoretical model and our empirical estimates; EU surplus could increase 20 percent with more pre-market testing; and "post-market surveillance" could increase surplus 24 percent.
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This paper reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done in this area over the last 10 years. In addition, there has been increasing development and use of frontier industrial organization methods. We begin by examining research on the determinants of market structure, considering both static and dynamic models. We then model the strategic determination of prices between health insurers and providers where insurers market their products to consumers based, in part, on the quality and breadth of their provider network. We then review the large empirical literature on the strategic determination of hospital prices through the lens of this model. Variation in the quality of health care clearly can have large welfare consequences. We therefore also describe the theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of market structure on quality of health care. The paper then moves on to consider competition in health insurance markets and physician services markets. We conclude by considering vertical restraints and monopsony power.
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We show that profit-maximizing firms alter product design in the market for Medicare prescription drug coverage to account for underutilization by consumers. Using plausibly exogenous variation in coverage, we examine prescription drug utilization under two different plan structures. We document that plans that cover all medical expenses spend more on drugs than plans that are only responsible for prescription drug spending, consistent with drug spending offsetting some medical costs. The effect is driven by drugs that are likely to generate substantial offsets. Our supply side model confirms that differential incentives across plans can explain this disparity. Counterfactuals show that the externality created by stand-alone drug plans is $405 million per year. Finally, we explore the extent to which subsidies and information provision can mitigate the externality generated by under-consumption.
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Health information technology (IT) adoption, it is argued, will dramatically improve patient care. We study the impact of hospital IT adoption on patient outcomes focusing on the roles of technological and organizational complements in affecting IT's value and explore underlying mechanisms through which IT facilitates the coordination of labor inputs. We link detailed hospital discharge data on all Medicare fee-for-service admissions from 2002-2007 to detailed hospital-level IT adoption information. We employ a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the parameters of interest. For all IT sensitive conditions we find that health IT adoption reduces mortality for the most complex patients but does not affect outcomes for the median patient. This implies that the benefits from IT adoption are skewed to large institutions with a severe case mix. We decompose the impact of health IT into care coordination, clinical information management, and other components. The benefits from health IT are primarily experienced by patients whose diagnoses require cross-specialty care coordination and extensive clinical information management.
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In healthcare and other bilateral oligopoly markets, prices are often negotiated by the contracting parties. Many hospitals have merged in recent years in part to gain bargaining leverage with managed care organizations (MCOs), leading to several antitrust trials. We specify and estimate a bargaining model of competition between hospitals and MCOs using claims and discharge data from Northern Virginia. We find that MCO bargaining restrains hospital prices significantly relative to standard insurance. Increasing patient coinsurance tenfold would reduce prices by 16%. A proposed hospital acquisition that was challenged by the Federal Trade Commission would have significantly raised hospital prices.
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The US health care sector is large and growing – health care spending in 2011 amounted to $2.7 trillion and 18% of GDP. Approximately half of health care output is allocated via markets. In this paper, we analyze the industrial organization literature on health care markets focusing on the impact of competition on price, quality and treatment decisions for health care providers and health insurers. We conclude with a discussion of research opportunities for industrial organization economists, including opportunities created by the US Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
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