EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Coping with Chronic Disease? Chronic Disease and Disability in Elderly American Population 1982-1999

Gabriel Aranovich, Jay Bhattacharya, Alan M. Garber and Thomas E. MaCurdy

No 14811, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: It is well known that disability rates among the American elderly have declined over the past decades. The cause of this decline is less well established. In this paper, we test one important possible explanation--that the decline in disability occurred because of chronic disease prevention efforts among the elderly. For this purpose we analyze data from the National Long Term Care Survey and from the National Health and Interview Survey. Our findings suggest that primary prevention, as reflected in decreased disease prevalence, was not responsible for advances made in elderly functioning between 1980 and 2000. We found a broad decline in less severe forms of disability that is unlikely to have resulted from improved disease management. Instead, these measured improvements in functioning may reflect environmental, technological, and/or socioeconomic changes. Improvements in the more severe forms of disability were modest and were restricted to those suffering from particular illnesses, which make improved and/or more aggressive management a plausible explanation and one that might increase costs should the trend persist.

JEL-codes: I1 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
Note: AG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Aranovich G, Bhattacharya J , Garber A, MaCurdy T, “Coping with Chronic Disease? Chronic Disease and Disability in Elderly American Population 1982 ‐ 1999,” Forum for Health Economics & Policy. 2009.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14811.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:nbr:nberwo:14811

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14811

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14811