Search Results
Working Paper
Decomposing Medical-Care Expenditure Growth
Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for almost one-fifth of GDP in 2009. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the disease level: service price growth, service utilization growth, treated disease prevalence growth, and demographic shift. The decomposition shows that growth in prices and treated prevalence are the primary drivers of medical-care expenditure growth over the 2003 to 2007 period. There was no growth in ...
Working Paper
Are Medicaid and Medicare Patients Treated Equally?
We examine whether Medicaid recipients receive the same health care services as those on Medicare. We track the services provided to the same individual as they age into Medicare from Medicaid at age 65. Cost sharing remains negligible across the insurance switch, implying that changes in care utilization reflects supply-side factors. Utilization increases by about 20 percent upon switching to Medicare. We find that 60 to 90 percent of the increase in office visits is explained by physicians averse to accepting Medicaid patients. This analysis provides new evidence that Medicaid’s smaller ...