Is There "Too Much" Inequality in Health Spending Across Income Groups?

Laurence Ales, Roozbeh Hosseini and Larry Jones

No 17937, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this paper we study the efficient allocation of health resources across individuals. We focus on the relation between health resources and income (taken as a proxy for productivity). In particular we determine the efficient level of the health care social safety net for the indigent. We assume that individuals have different life cycle profiles of productivity. Health care increases survival probability. We adopt the classical approach of welfare economics by considering how a central planner with an egalitarian (ex-ante) perspective would allocate resources. We show that, under the efficient allocation, health care spending increases with labor productivity, but only during the working years. Post retirement, everyone would get the same health care. Quantitatively, we find that the amount of inequality across the income distribution in the data is larger that what would be justified solely on the basis of production efficiency, but not drastically so. As a rough summary, in U.S. data top to bottom spending ratios are about 1.5 for most of the life cycle. Efficiency implies a decline from about 2 (at age 25) to 1 at retirement. We find larger inefficiencies in the lower part of the income distribution and in post retirement ages.

JEL-codes: H4 H51 I18 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dge, nep-hea and nep-ltv
Note: EFG EH PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Working Paper: Is There ``Too Much'''' Inequality in Health Spending Across Income Groups?
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