Incorporating Data on Assets into Measures of Financial Burdens for Health.

摘要

The elderly and non-elderly devote different proportions of their family income to health care because both parts of the equation--their expected health care needs and their resources to meet those needs are very different. What is an appropriate threshold for a non-elderly individual or family compared to an elderly individual or family. If the thresholds are not the same, is there a way to develop a consistent threshold for elderly and non-elderly families that recognizes their very different resources and needs regarding medical care as a part of their overall household budget. In the work that follows, we show that the distributions of burdens for elderly and non-elderly families are quite different. We then investigate the distribution of assets in both groups. Finally, we compute burdens using different thresholds and different measures of resources to define high burdens. One approach incorporates 5 percent of total net assets into the resources available to elderly families to pay medical expenses as a simplified method for drawing down assets in retirement. We do not make this adjustment for non-elderly families since they are expected to be saving for the future rather than drawing down on current savings.