The Tax Subsidy to Employment-Based Health Insurance and the Distribution of Well-Being

Pauly considers some recent contrasting views on the distributional effects of the tax subsidy within employment groups. He shows that the correct answer depends on what one assumes to be the within-group incidence of the reduction in money wages that occurs when group insurance is part of a competitive compensation package

The Truth about Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection. Eighteenth Annual Herbert Lourie Memorial Lecture on Health Policy.

This brief is actually going to have two levels. One level will go with the advertised title, and I’ll tell you my current views on the truth about moral hazard and adverse selection. Adverse selection will serve as somewhat of a handmaid of moral hazard, as you will see. That’s one level. The other level, though, which continues to surprise me, is that these two topics—they’re two buzzwords from insurance theory—have generated an enormous amount of policy interest and, yes, passion. Some people passionately believe some things about moral hazard that others passionately disbelieve. And so as part of this second level I will draw back a bit from the actual subject matter to ask a kind of positive public policy question: Why is it that some people can get so passionate about a subject that seems fairly esoteric?health insurance, adverse selection, moral hazard

The Role of Physicians in the Production of Hospital Output

The purpose of this paper is to present estimates of production functions for hospitals in which a measure of the level of physician input is utilized. Since no data on the total number of hours worked by non-salaried physicians is available for a large sample of U.S. hospitals, alternative measures of physician input had to be constructed. As these measures are somewhat imperfect, the results I obtain should be considered tentative and preliminary.