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Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of market-wide changes in health insurance by examining the single largest change in health insurance coverage in American history: the introduction of Medicare in 1965. I estimate that the impact of Medicare on hospital spending is substantially larger than what the existing evidence from individual-level changes in health insurance would have predicted. Consistent with a disproportionately larger impact of aggregate changes in health insurance, the evidence suggests that the introduction of Medicare altered the practice of medicine. For example, I find that the introduction of Medicare is associated with an increase in the rate of adoption of then-new medical technologies. A back of the envelope calculation based on the estimated impact of Medicare suggests that the overall spread of health insurance between 1950 and 1990 may be able to explain at least forty percent of the increase in real per capita health spending over this time period.

Over the past half century, Americans spent a rising share of total economic resources on health and enjoyed substantially longer lives as a result. Debate on health policy often focuses on limiting the growth of health spending. We investigate an issue central to this debate: Is the growth of health spending a rational response to changing economic conditions-notably the growth of income per person? We develop a model based on standard economic assumptions and argue that this is indeed the case. Standard preferences-of the kind used widely in economics to study consumption, asset pricing, and labor supply-imply that health spending is a superior good with an income elasticity well above one. As people get richer and consumption rises, the marginal utility of consumption falls rapidly. Spending on health to extend life allows individuals to purchase additional periods of utility. The marginal utility of life extension does not decline. As a result, the optimal composition of total spending shifts toward health, and the health share grows along with income. In projections based on the quantitative analysis of our model, the optimal health share of spending seems likely to exceed 30 percent by the middle of the century.

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Basic economic theory suggests that health insurance coverage may cause a reduction in prevention activities, but empirical studies have yet to provide evidence to support this prediction. However, in other insurance contexts that involve adverse health events, evidence of ex ante moral hazard is more consistent. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the effect of health insurance on health behaviors by allowing for the possibility that health insurance has a direct (ex ante moral hazard) and indirect effect on health behaviors. The indirect effect works through changes in health promotion information and the probability of illness that may be a byproduct of insurance-induced greater contact with medical professionals. We identify these two effects and in doing so identify the pure ex ante moral hazard effect. This study exploits the plausibly exogenous variation in health insurance as a result of obtaining Medicare coverage at age 65. We find limited evidence that obtaining health insurance reduces prevention and increases unhealthy behaviors among elderly persons. There is more robust evidence that physician counseling is successful in changing health behaviors.

Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. We exploit a sharp change in insurance coverage rates that results from young adults “aging out” of their parents ’ insurance plans to estimate the effect of insurance coverage on the utilization of emergency department (ED) and inpa-tient services. Aging out results in an abrupt 5 to 8 percentage point reduction in the probability of having health insurance. We find that uninsured status leads to a 40 percent reduction in ED visits and a 61 percent reduction in inpatient hospital admissions. (JEL G22, I11, I18) Over one-quarter of nonelderly adults in the United States lacked health insur-ance at some point in 2007 (Schoen et al. 2008). A large body of research documents a strong association between insurance status and particular patterns of health care utilization. The uninsured are less likely to consume preventative care such as diagnostic exams and routine checkups (Ayanian et al. 2000). They are more likely to be hospitalized for conditions that—if treated promptly—do not require

Health insurance characteristics shift at age 65 as most people become eligi-ble for Medicare. We measure the impacts of these changes on patients who are admitted to hospitals through emergency departments for conditions with similar admission rates on weekdays and weekends. The age profiles of admissions and comorbidities for these patients are smooth at age 65, suggesting that the sever-ity of illness is similar on either side of the Medicare threshold. In contrast, the number of procedures performed in hospitals and total list charges exhibit small but statistically significant discontinuities, implying that patients over 65 receive more services. We estimate a nearly 1-percentage-point drop in 7-day mortality for patients at age 65, equivalent to a 20 % reduction in deaths for this severely ill patient group. The mortality gap persists for at least 9 months after admission. I.

this paper are available at Jones's website