NBER Working Papers by Michael Ganz

In several states, the Medicaid program allows beneficiaries a choice among multiple managed care plans and traditional Medicaid. This paper uses data from a survey of New York City Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled in conventional Medicaid and in 5 Medicaid managed care plans to study the effect of plan selection on measures of satisfaction with care, access to a regular source of care, and utilization of ambulatory and emergency room services. We use information on health status to evaluate selection on observable characteristics; variation in geographic patterns of enrollment to assess selection on unobservable characteristics; and survey responses to questions about source of information about a plan to study selection responses to plan marketing. We find that managed care enrollees dif...