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Geographic variation in commercial medical-care expenditures: A framework for decomposing price and utilization

2013; Elsevier BV; Volume: 32; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jhealeco.2013.09.006

1879-1646

Abe Dunn, Adam Hale Shapiro, Eli Liebman,

Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life

This study introduces a new framework for measuring and analyzing medical-care expenditures. The framework focuses on expenditures at the disease level that are decomposed between price and utilization. We find that both price and utilization differences are important contributors to expenditure differences across commercial markets. Further examination shows that for some diseases utilization drives variation while for others price is more important. Finally, when disease-specific measures are aggregated across diseases, much of the important disease-specific variation is masked, leading to much smaller measures of aggregate variation.