Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Edited by Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt,
and David M. Cutler
512 pages, 62 line drawings, 113 tables
$130 (cloth)

Health care costs represent nearly 18 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and 20 percent 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. Some examples: research in this volume investigates 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 in Income and Wealth series is full of insights relevant to health policy students and specialists alike.