Medical Consumption over the Life Cycle: Facts from a U.S. Medical Expenditure Panel Survey

Juergen Jung and Chung Tran

No 2010-09, Working Papers from Towson University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate the association between age and medical spending in the U.S. using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). We estimate a partial linear seminonparametric model and construct "pure" life-cycle profiles of health spending simultaneously controlling for time effects (i.e. institutional changes and business cycles effects) and cohort effects (i.e. generation specific conditions). We find that time and cohort effects introduce a significant estimation bias into predictions of health expenditures per age group, especially for individuals older than 60 years. The estimation biases introduced by cohort effects increase monotonically with age while time effects are non-monotone. Overall, cohort effect biases dominate time effect biases in magnitude for high age groups.

Keywords: Age dependent U.S. health care spending; U.S. health expenditure decomposition; life-cycle profiles; partial linear models; pseudo panels; medical expenditure panel survey (MEPS). (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C23 D12 D91 I10 I11 J10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2010-04, Revised 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://webapps.towson.edu/cbe/economics/workingpapers/2010-09.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Medical Consumption Over the Life Cycle: Facts from a U.S. Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tow:wpaper:2010-09

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