 Medical Care Price Indices: Problems and Opportunities / The Chung-Hua LecturesNo 8168, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc Abstract: These Chung-Hua Lectures, given at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan in December 2000, summarize work that has been done by myself and others on biases in medical care price indices. I begin by reviewing various uses of price indices and therefore why biases in the overall indices - and changes in those biases - matter. I then describe briefly the assumptions and theory underlying the official price indices. I next turn to the problems of measuring medical prices, assuming the basic applicability of the theory upon which the official indices are based. Finally I take up the potential inapplicability of the assumptions made by that theory and the resulting issues for measuring medical price changes. I describe an alternative theory and its implications for the measurement of medical prices. I conclude that the biases in the official medical care index, while substantially reduced by recent improvements, likely remain substantial enough to affect the overall official indices in the United States, especially the GDP deflator, where the weight of medical care is around 13 percent. JEL-codes: I1 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8168 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from 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. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.