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The Concentration of Medical Spending: An Update

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Author Info
David M. Cutler
Ellen Meara

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Abstract

In the last two decades, Medicare spending has doubled in real terms despite the fact that the health of Medicare beneficiaries improved over this period. The goals of this paper are to document how trends in spending by age have changed among elderly Medicare beneficiaries in the last decade and to reconcile the decline in disability rates with rapid increases in spending among the elderly. First, we conclude that the trend of disproportionate spending growth among the oldest old has continued between 1985 and 1995. Spending among the younger elderly, those 65-69 rose by two percent annually in real per person terms. In contrast, spending for those over age 85 rose by four percent. Second we show that the reasons for the large increase in spending on the oldest elderly relative to the younger elderly is the rapid increase in the use of post-acute services such as home health care and skilled nursing care. Spending on post-acute care for the very old has risen 20 percent per year in the last decade.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 7279.

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Date of creation: Aug 1999
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7279

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  1. David M. Cutler & Louise Sheiner, 1999. "Demographics and medical care spending: standard and non-standard effects," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1999-20, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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  2. David M. Cutler & Ellen Meara, 1998. "The Medical Costs of the Young and Old: A Forty-Year Perspective," NBER Chapters, in: Frontiers in the Economics of Aging, pages 215-246 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!]
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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Cassio M. Turra & Olivia S. Mitchell, 2004. "The Impact of Health Status and Out-of-Pocket Medical Expenditures on Annuity Valuation," Working Papers wp086, University of Michigan, Michigan Retirement Research Center. [Downloadable!]
  2. Ed Westerhout & Frank Pellikaan, 2005. "Can we afford to live longer in better health?," CPB Documents 85, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. [Downloadable!]
  3. Gabriel Picone & R. Mark Wilson & Shin-Yi Chou, 2003. "Analysis of hospital length of stay and discharge destination using hazard functions with unmeasured heterogeneity," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 12(12), pages 1021-1034. [Downloadable!]
  4. Carlos Bethencourt & Vincenzo Galasso, . "On the Political Complementarity between Health Care and Social Security," Working Papers 184, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  5. Louise Sheiner, 2004. "The effects of technology on the age distribution of health spending: a cross-country perspective," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2004-14, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
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