A Direct Measure of Medical Innovation on Health Care Spending: A Condition-Specific Approach

Abe Dunn, Lasanthi Fernando and Eli Liebman

BEA Papers from Bureau of Economic Analysis

Abstract: While technological innovation is believed to be a key driver of spending growth, measuring this relationship is challenging. We address this challenge using a large database of cost-effectiveness studies, which we use to develop proxy measures of inno- vation for specific conditions. We connect to data on spending growth at the condition level from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Health Care Satellite Account (HCSA). We find our proxy for innovation is significantly related to spending growth, even after accounting for a number of factors. We estimate that about 18 percent of real spending growth per capita is explained by our proxy for innovation, which we argue is likely a lower bound for the actual contribution of technology on spending growth.

JEL-codes: E01 I10 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bea.gov/system/files/papers/BEA-WP2023-10.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bea:papers:0121

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in BEA Papers from Bureau of Economic Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Batch ().