Attributing Medical Spending to Conditions: A Comparison of Methods

David Cutler, Kaushik Ghosh, Irina Bondarenko, Kassandra Messer, Trivellore Raghunathan, Susan Stewart and Allison B. Rosen

No 25233, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Partitioning medical spending into conditions is essential to understanding the cost burden of medical care. Two broad strategies have been used to measure disease-specific spending. The first attributes each medical claim to the condition listed as its cause. The second decomposes total spending for a person over a year to the cumulative set of conditions they have. Traditionally, this has been done through regression analysis. This paper makes two contributions. First, we develop a new method to attribute spending to conditions using propensity score models. Second, we compare the claims attribution approach to the regression approach and our propensity score stratification method in a common set of beneficiaries age 65 and over drawn from the 2009 Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey. Our estimates show that the three methods have important differences in spending allocation and that the propensity score model likely offers the best theoretical and empirical combination.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: AG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25233.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:25233

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25233

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 ().