Factors accounting for the rise in health-care spending in the United States: The role of rising disease prevalence and treatment intensity

References 

1. See, 〈http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/tables.pdf.〉, Accessed August 15, 2006.
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3. Thorpe KE, Florence C, Howard D, Joski P. The rising prevalence of treated disease: effects on private health insurance spending. Health Affair Web Exclusive, June 27, 2005.
4. Thorpe KE, Florence C, Joski P. Which medical conditions accounts for the rise in health care spending?. Health Affair Web Exclusive, August 25, 2004.
5. Available at URL: 〈http://www.ahrq.gov/data/mepsweb.htm#full-year〉. Accessed June 1, 2005. Compared to the spending estimates developed by the Department of Health and Human Services (the National Health Accounts (NHA) estimates), the MEPS spending estimates focuses on the non-institutionalized population and does not include the same breadth of services (e.g. spending for nursing home care). As a result, the MEPS produces estimates of national health-care spending lower than those produced through the NHA approach. However, both the populations and services included in the MEPS are those typically financed through private insurance. A detailed cross-walk between the two estimates has been developed by T. Seldon, K. Levitt, J. Cohen, S. Zuvekas, et. al., “Reconciling Medical Expenditure Estimates from the MEPS and NHA, 1996,” Health-care Financing Review 23, no. 1 (2001): 161–178. This review found substantial agreement in the estimates for the non-institutionalized population for services generally included in private health insurance plans. When the NHE is compared to the MEPS (on a comparable basis focusing on to spending included in both surveys among the civilian non-institutionalized population) spending totals were within 6.7 per cent of each other.
6. Zuvekas S, Cohen JW. A Guide to Comparing Health care Expenditures in the 1996 MEPS to the 1987 NMES. Inquiry 2002; 39, (1): 76–86. The unadjusted spending data from the 1987 were based on charges while the MEPS spending data used payments to providers. We used the approach outlined by AHRQ to make the two surveys comparable by transforming the 1987 NMES data to payments. The unadjusted charge-based total spending in the 1987 NMES was $363.6 billion. The adjusted NMES totals based on payments used in our analysis is $314.1 billion.
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10. For 4 of the top 15 medical conditions, this ratio was close to 1. They were cases where a substantial share of total spending was traced to events with the single medical condition. As a result, in these four cases, the best guess and the upper bound estimate are the same. Moreover, the upper and lower bound estimates for these 4 conditions were virtually identical.
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19. Thorpe KE, Florence CS, Howard DH, Joski P. The impact of obesity on rising medical spending. Health Affair Web Exclusive, October 20, 2004.
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