Regulation, Access, and Efficiency in Health Care Markets

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Health care markets are shaped by regulatory frameworks and institutional arrangements that influence access, efficiency, and consumer welfare. This panel brings together four papers that use rigorous theoretical and empirical methods to examine how regulatory design and institutional context affect provider behavior, patient access, and resource allocation across distinct health care market contexts. The first paper addresses a foundational methodological gap in the abortion access literature, arguing that existing reduced-form studies estimate outcome gaps rather than welfare gaps. The authors develop a formal model of abortion decision-making and show that using observed outcomes to proxy for welfare gains systematically overstates the welfare benefits of abortion access, with supporting evidence from the Turnaway study. The second paper studies the rapid adoption of ambient AI documentation technology in a large health system, exploiting staggered deployment across provider specialties to estimate causal effects on documentation burden, coding behavior, and financial returns. The analysis also examines whether efficiency gains are distributed equitably across provider types and patient populations, including Medicaid-insured and limited-English-proficient patients. The third paper examines how evidentiary standards in workers' compensation programs affect the targeting efficiency of disability benefits. Exploiting state-level reforms that shifted the burden of proof onto claimants, the paper finds substantial reductions in indemnity payments concentrated among workers with difficult-to-diagnose injuries, with limited evidence of negative health consequences. The fourth paper analyzes the welfare implications of bundling prescription medications with physician appointments, using pharmacist prescribing authority reforms as identifying variation and administrative claims data. A structural demand model quantifies how appointment-related access costs distort demand for hormonal contraceptives and simulates counterfactual policy scenarios. Taken together, the panel foregrounds questions of access, equity, and distributional consequences across health care markets and regulatory contexts. The papers collectively examine populations that are frequently underrepresented in economic analyses of health policy, including low-income and uninsured patients, injured workers in physically demanding occupations, women with limited access to reproductive health services, and patients in safety-net health systems serving racially and linguistically diverse communities. By bringing rigorous causal and structural methods to bear on these populations and contexts, the panel moves beyond average treatment effects to surface heterogeneity that is directly relevant to policy design. The findings speak to a broad range of stakeholders, including health system administrators, insurance regulators, workforce planners, and policymakers working to ensure that health care markets and regulatory programs serve all populations equitably.

Policy Area

• Health Policy

Chair

• Seoyeon (Sienna) Lim, University of Georgia

Discussants

• Costas Lambros, Indiana University

• Nayantara Biswas, Harvard University

Organizer

• Jennifer A Mangano, Indiana University

Individual Presentations

• Implicit Theoretical Foundations of the Empirical Abortion Literature - Presenting Author: Tim Bersak, Wofford College

• Economic Evaluation of Ambient AI Documentation Across Provider Specialties - Presenting Author: Arjun Teotia, Henry Ford Health System

• Measuring the screening effects of evidentiary standards: Evidence from workers’ compensation claims - Presenting Author: Tony LoSasso, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• The Cost of Permission: Bundled Prescription Access and Consumer Welfare - Presenting Author: Jennifer A Mangano, Indiana University