The Economics of Preventive Care
Many preventive services are underutilized in spite of the fact that they are highly cost-effective. This session features three papers on how the use of preventive services responds to patient and provider incentives. The first paper, by Ben Handel (University of California at Berkeley) and Jonathan Kolstad (University of Pennsylvania), analyzes the impact of physician financial incentives and information technology on preventive service delivery using a unique proprietary data set from a large insurer that covers most of the population for the state of Hawaii. The second paper, by Tom Buchmueller, Helen Levy, and Laura Wherry (all University of Michigan), analyzes the impact of the Affordable Care Act’s ban on patient cost-sharing for certain preventive services using detailed microdata from a single very large employer. The third paper, by Marianne Bitler (University of California at Irvine) and Christopher Carpenter (Vanderbilt University), examines the effects of state cervical cancer insurance mandates on the rates of screening for cervical cancer.