Importance of Pricing the Bundle of Treatments

摘要

The health care services sector is a large and growing segment of the economy. The share of GDP devoted to health care services has doubled over the past 25 years, to 16 percent in 2005. Looking ahead, this growth is expected to continue, as aging baby boomers continue to increase the share of elderly in the population, a segment of the population that accounts for a disproportionately high level of expenditures on health. The rising health care costs have raised questions about whether these medical expenditures are, in some sense, worth it. A natural starting point is to ask how much of the rising costs represent increases in real services vs. price inflation, a question that can be addressed using price deflators or indexes. However, studies in the health economics literature have raised questions about the use of standard price indexes for this purpose and their empirical findings suggest that some of what is currently recorded as price increases actually represents increases in services.