Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How have medical expenditures varied over time and across states? That is the question being asked by Johnson et al. (2022) in a recent Health Affairs paper. The authors use State Health Expenditure Accounts data between 1999-2014 and then extrapolate these trends forward with a regression-based approach to predict State spending through 2019. Using this…
In a paper by Martin et al. (2020) in Health Affairs, CMS’s Office of the Actuary (OACT) has its annual health care spending estimates for 2019. They found that health care spending in the US was $3.8 trillion in 2019, and increase of 4.7%. The share of the economy dedicated to health care rose slightly,…
Previous analyses–such as Basu and Manning 2009–have addressed the problem of mass of health care expenditures around $0. In typical economic analyses, we assume that the dependent variable is normally distributed. In the case of health care expenditures, however, a large number of people have $0 expenditures (i.e., healthy individuals). Further, among sick individuals that…