Implications of Utilization Shifts on Medical-Care Price Measurement

Abe Dunn, Eli Liebman and Adam Shapiro

BEA Working Papers from Bureau of Economic Analysis

Abstract: The medical-care sector often experiences changes in medical protocols and technologies that cause shifts in treatments. However, the commonly used medical-care price indexes reported by the BLS hold the mix of medical services fixed. In contrast, episode expenditure indexes, advocated by many health economists, track the full cost of disease treatment, even as treatments shift across service categories (e.g., inpatient to outpatient hospital). In our data, we find that these two conceptually different measures of price growth show similar aggregate rates of inflation. Although aggregate trends are similar, we observe differences when looking at specific disease categories that have implications for the productivity of disease treatment.

JEL-codes: E60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Journal Article: Implications of Utilization Shifts on Medical‐care Price Measurement (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bea:wpaper:0087

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