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Much recent public debate centers around failures in the U.S. health care system. Studies indicate that as many as 33 million Americans are without health insurance, while health care expenditures continue to out‐strip GNP growth. Numerous proposals for national health insurance have surfaced in response to these apparent shortcomings. The various proposed health insurance structures are not always based upon careful economic evaluation of incentive schemes and of the full range of potential effects. This paper examines results of recent Medicaid system studies so as to shed light upon the outcomes one can expect from national health insurance plans possessing similar incentive structures. The results here have potentially useful policy implications.

One of the more contentious policy changes in the past decade in the United States involves the decisions by several state legislatures and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to permit sales of emergency contraception on a nonprescription basis. We took advantage of a set of natural experiments to estimate the impact of changes in state and federal level nonprescription emergency contraception access on the probability of high‐school students' sexual and contraceptive behaviors. We extracted data from the Youth Risk Behavioral Survey for New England states that had data about contraceptive use (Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) from 2003 to 2009. We combined this student‐level data with information on when states and the FDA began allowing nonprescription sales of emergency contraceptives. We estimated a series of difference‐in‐difference models on the impact of these policies on the probability that students were sexually active and on the probability of condom or hormonal birth control use conditional on sexual activity. We found that switching emergency contraception to a nonprescription status had no systematic effect on the probability of sexual activity or the conditional probability of hormonal birth control use, but that it significantly reduced the probability that public school students used condoms by between 5.2% and 7.2%. (JEL I18, I12, I29)

Reviews the history of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, presents theoretical arguments for and against it, and critiques direct-to-consumer advertising research focused on survey results and advertising content analysis. The authors' research, evaluations of detailed, patient-level information, is then discussed.