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01 The Health Costs of Cost Sharing Amitabh Chandra, Evan Flack, Ziad Obermeyer Abstract: What happens when patients suddenly stop their medications? We study the health consequences of drug interruptions caused by large, abrupt, and arbitrary changes in price. Medicare’s prescription drug benefit as-if-randomly assigns 65-year-olds a drug budget as a function of their birth month, beyond which out-of-pocket costs suddenly increase. Those facing smaller budgets consume fewer drugs and die more: mortality increases 0.0164 percentage points per month (13.9%) for each $100 per month budget decrease (24.4%). This estimate is robust to a range of falsification checks and lies in the 97.8th percentile of 544 placebo estimates from similar populations that lack the same idiosyncratic budget policy. Several facts help make sense of this large effect. First, patients stop taking drugs t hat are both high value and suspected to cause life-threatening withdrawal syndromes when stopped. Second
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