Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. 

The research in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs seeks to connect our knowledge of expenditures with what we are able to measure of results, probing questions of methodology, changes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the shifting landscape of physician practice. The research in this volume investigates, for example, obesity’s effect on health care spending, the effect of generic pharmaceutical releases on the market, and the disparity between disease-based and population-based spending measures. This vast and varied volume applies a range of economic tools to the analysis of health care and health outcomes.

Practical and descriptive, this new volume in the Studies of Income and Wealth series is full of insights relevant to health policy students and specialists alike.

Ana Aizcorbe is a research professor at the Social and Decision Analytics Laboratory (SDAL) at the Virginia Bioinformatics Laboratory at Virginia Tech. She is former Chief Economist of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Colin Baker is social science analyst at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Ernst Berndt is the Louis E. Seley Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. David M. Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.