A Cross-Country Analysis of Health Care Expenditures

Alex Horenstein and Manuel Santos

No 2013-05, Working Papers from University of Miami, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper is concerned with growth patterns of US health care expenditures. Within a representative sample of OECD countries, we lay out a growth accounting exercise for health care expenditures to assess the influence of several explanatory variables. Our analysis demonstrates that the relative price of medical care and some health care laws can trace down fairly well the differential increase in US medical expenditures over the period 1970-2007. We then explore some major factors driving US medical care prices - including prescription drugs, the degree of competition, malpractice, and out-of-pocket expenditures. Some other explanatory variables - income growth, technological change, life expectancy, physicians' compensation, trends in aging population, and defensive medicine - would seem unable to account for the differential increase in US medical expenditures over various time periods.

Keywords: Health care expenditures; relative price of medical care; growth accounting; price elasticity; technological change; malpractice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E31 I10 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2012-12-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.herbert.miami.edu/_assets/files/repec/WP2013-05.pdf First version, 2012 (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:mia:wpaper:2013-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Miami, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daniela Valdivia ().