Medical Expenditure Measures in the Health and Retirement Study

Dana Goldman, Julie Zissimopoulos () and Lu Yang
Additional contact information
Lu Yang: University of Southern California, yalu@chla.usc.edu

Forum for Health Economics & Policy, 2011, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-33

Abstract: This paper reviews out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenditure measures collected in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). Medical expenditures are an important cost of poor health. Medical expenditure measures are important for understanding retirement decisions, financial preparation for retirement, and predicting the consequences of health care reform, particularly Medicare reform. Despite the comprehensiveness of the HRS, there are always limitations to what can be learned from population interviews. To assess the quality of current HRS measures of OOP spending, we compare various measures of OOP spending across survey waves to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), two surveys that expend considerable resources on measuring both OOP spending and total medical expenditures. Such comparisons make it possible to identify potential bias in the HRS data and to improve HRS measures of OOP. We find that the HRS produces good quality and useful data on OOP spending.

Keywords: medical expenditures; HRS; MCBS; MEPS; Health and Retirement Study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1558-9544.1267 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:fhecpo:v:14:y:2011:i:3:n:4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/fhep/html

DOI: 10.2202/1558-9544.1267

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Health Economics & Policy is currently edited by Dana Goldman

More articles in Forum for Health Economics & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().