Comparison of health care spending by age in 8 high-income countries

Irene Papanicolas, Alberto Marino, Luca Lorenzoni and Ashish Jha

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The United States spends more on health care than any other country.1 Unlike many other high-income countries, which have largely uniform financing schemes for health care, the US has different financing schemes for different populations. The degree to which this fragmentation in US financing explains higher spending is not clear. Some policy makers believe that expanding the Medicare model, which has a financing system that more closely resembles that of other high-income countries (ie, it is government run and tax financed), could reduce spending substantially. To examine whether this policy has potential, this cross-sectional study compared nominal and relative spending in the US, by 5-year age groupings, with that of other high-income countries that have more homogenous financing systems. This comparison allows us to better understand spending differentials between the US and other countries for people aged 65 years or older, as well as for other age groups.

JEL-codes: E6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 3 pages
Date: 2020-08-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-mac
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in JAMA network open, 6, August, 2020, 3(8). ISSN: 2574-3805

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/105109/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:105109

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().