AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 2, June 2011
The Bulletin on Aging & Health
New health care technologies offer the promise of improved health and longevity, but also are widely viewed as the biggest contributor to rising health care costs in the U.S. This duality raises the question of whether new technologies are worth the cost and how the rate of health care innovation can be slowed if the costs of new technology exceed the benefits.
In Technology Growth and Expenditure Growth in Health Care (NBER Working Paper 16953), researchers Amitabh...
Article
A central goal of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) is to cut the number of uninsured Americans from the current level of roughly 50 million. To achieve this goal, the ACA includes an expansion of Medicaid, substantial premium subsidies for low- and middle-income households, health insurance exchanges, and an individual mandate.
Projections of the effect of the ACA, much of which is not implemented until 2014 or later, rely on existing estimates of the price...
Article
The decision of when to claim Social Security benefits is one of the most economically significant choices facing older Americans. Eligible individuals are entitled to claim benefits as early as age 62 but can defer claiming to as late as age 70. Monthly benefit levels are adjusted depending on claiming age-for example, an individual who stops working at age 62 but waits to claim until age 70 will receive a monthly benefit that is 76 percent higher (in real terms) than what...