The Medical Costs of The Young and Old: A Forty Year Perspective

David Cutler and Ellen Meara

No 6114, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this paper, we examine the growth in medical care spending by age over the past 40 years. We show that between 1953 and 1987, medical spending increased disproportionately for infants, those under 1 year, and the elderly, those 65 and older. Annual spending growth for infants was 9.8 percent and growth for the elderly was 8.0 percent compared to 4.7 percent for people aged 1-64. Within the infant and the elderly population, excess spending growth was largely driven by more rapid growth of spending at the top of the medical spending distribution. Aggregate changes in outcomes for infants and the elderly are consistent with these changes in spending growth, but we do not present any causal evidence on this point.

Date: 1997-07
Note: AG EH PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as The Medical Costs of the Young and Old: A Forty-Year Perspective , David M. Cutler, Ellen Meara. in Frontiers in the Economics of Aging , Wise. 1998

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6114.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: The Medical Costs of the Young and Old: A Forty-Year Perspective (1998)
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:6114

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w6114

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 ().