Board Meeting - April 16, 2026 YouTube video by MA Health Policy Commission

And live stream at www.youtube.com/live/nl9Ctqd...

Is Massachusetts’ Healthcare Spending Growing Faster than the Economy? April 16, 2026 Healthcare affordability is a real and urgent challenge in Massachusetts. Families feel it in premiums and deductibles. Employers feel it in compensation costs. The state feels it in…

Details at practicingeconomist.com/2026/04/16/i...

I'm looking forward to discussing how Massachusetts' healthcare spending has grown relative to the economy at today's Health Policy Commission meeting.

We rely on the state attorneys general and their ability to enforce our laws as never before. And they are rising to the occasion!

HPC leadership smiling in Faneuil Hall

Speakers on stage at Faneuil Hall

Today, the HPC was proud to join the twentieth anniversary of health care reform in Massachusetts celebration hosted by the @healthconnector.bsky.social.

Read HPC Executive Director David Seltz’s statement on the reform milestone: masshpc.gov/news/press-r...

The Size of the LGBT Population and the Magnitude of Anti-Gay Sentiment are Substantially Underestimated Measuring sexual orientation, behavior, and related opinions is difficult because responses are biased towards socially acceptable answers. We test whether measurements are biased even when respons…

Ungated version here: practicingeconomist.com/2013/10/07/t...

Social desirability bias is real! We showed that surveys dramatically underestimated anti-gay attitudes, and that if you asked with a more privacy protecting method, people shifted their views. Not sure if anyone has used the method for racial issues. pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10....

Just posted! We're hiring for a full time lecturer in analytics/econometrics at BU Questrom for this coming fall. Apply ASAP at academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/31942

Paper: journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/NX5AMSHZYCNKHF78M7I7/full?redirectUri=/doi/epdf/10.1086/737242

Thank you!

Proud to have "Nonbinary Gender Economics" out in JPE Micro. We document the economic experiences and preferences of nonbinary individuals—a population of 1M+ in the US that is often overlooked.

Hearing testimony today on Massachusetts's Health Care Cost Growth Benchmark.

Non-Binary Gender Economics “Non-Binary Gender Economics” addresses the dearth of data on non-binary individuals in economics. The findings reveal significant differences in gender-based discrimination, career asp…

General interest summary here: practicingeconomist.com/2024/03/11/n...

Let me know your thoughts! Paper herejournals.uchicago.edu/eprint/NX5AMSHZYCNKHF78M7I7/full?redirectUri=/doi/epdf/10.1086/737242 . Thank you to fabulous coauthors, Luke Coffman and Katie Coffman!

Finally, nonbinary individuals have distinctive life aspirations: more motivated by helping their community, less by money, and substantially less likely to want children.

We also ask about stereotypes. People hold substantially inaccurate stereotypes about nonbinary individuals. They often get the direction of group differences wrong or exaggerate their size.

On time preferences, NB individuals report more impatience than either men or women. On social preferences, they're less prosocial than women but not consistently between men and women—it depends on the dimension.

Turning to measures of preferences, non-binary respondents score *lower* than both men and women on measures self-assertion—competitiveness, willingness to negotiate, self-efficacy. The NB-others gap is nearly as large as the M-F gap.

Indeed, anti-nonbinary sentiment among men and women exceeds anti-LGBT sentiment. And while the modal response is zero discomfort, roughly half of men and women report some discomfort with nonbinary individuals.

Nonbinary individuals report more gender-based discrimination than men or women in nearly every setting—school, medical, public, police, online. The exception: work, where they report similar levels as women.

Proud to have "Nonbinary Gender Economics" out in JPE Micro. We document the economic experiences and preferences of nonbinary individuals—a population of 1M+ in the US that is often overlooked.

Pricing Regulation and Imperfect Competition on the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange Abstract. We analyze insurance-pricing regulation under imperfect competition on the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. Differential markups lead to price variation apart from cost variation. Co...

Younger people do not just cross-subsidize older people. They also make the market more competitive and lower markups over cost. When they leave, the remaining pool less price sensitive, which can raise markups, leading to partial unraveling we warned about in the paper. doi.org/10.1162/REST...

In our paper, Pricing Regulation and Imperfect Competition on the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange, Amanda Starc and I showed that younger consumers are substantially more price sensitive than older consumers.

The decline in ACA marketplace enrollment after the end of the enhanced subsidies is troubling. It is not just that people are having more difficulty affording insurance-- who leaves the market also affects how well the market works. www.wsj.com/health/healt...

This administration is using healthcare fraud- a real policy concern- as a fig leaf to target political enemies. An administration that repeatedly lies and violates the law and Constitution shouldn't be trusted with unchecked power to arbitrarily pull funding without due process.

Medicare Part B spends over $40 billion on physician-administered drugs. Our new study, forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics, finds that the program's payment formula slows drug price growth over time.

Team: Angie Acquatella, Keith Marzilli Ericson, Amanda Starc
Full paper: authors.elsevier.com/c/1meWZAlwA2...

We need to account for dynamics when forecasting the cost of government drug procurement. While our focus here is on US Medicare, similar dynamic incentives can be created from European external reference pricing systems.

We find that drugs with above-median Medicare exposure had approximately 10% lower prices after 3 years compared to less-exposed drugs that launched at the same price. The effect was larger for newly approved molecules facing limited competition, suggesting the main estimates are conservative.

Firms often follow an "invest then harvest" strategy: enter at a low price, then raise prices later. But Medicare's lagged-price formula flips the incentives. A high early price locks in generous Medicare reimbursement. Restrained price increases (or decreases) give providers better margins later.