TY - JOUR AU - Glied, Sherry A AU - Prabhu, Ashwin AU - Edelman, Norman H TI - The Cost of Primary Care Doctors JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14568 PY - 2008 Y2 - December 2008 DO - 10.3386/w14568 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14568 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14568.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Sherry A. Glied Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service New York University 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10012 Tel: 212-998-7527 Fax: 212-995-4161 E-Mail: sherry.glied@nyu.edu Ashwin Prabhu Health Policy & Management Columbia University 600 West 168th Street 6th Floor New York, NY 10032 Tel: 212/305-7970 Fax: 212/305-3405 E-Mail: agp2014@columbia.edu Norman H. Edelman Stony Brook University Graduate Program in Public Health Department of Preventive Medicine Stony Brook, New York, 11794-8036 E-Mail: norman.edelman@stonybrook.edu M1 - published as Sherry Glied, Ashwin G. Prabhu, Norman Edelman. "The Cost of Primary Care Doctors," in David Cutler, Alan Garber, and Dana Goldman, organizers, "Frontiers in Health Policy Research, volume 12" The Berkeley Electronic Press (2008) AB - This study uses a human capital model to estimate the societal cost of producing a physician service. Physician human capital consists of the underlying human capital (productivity) of those who become physicians and the job-specific investments (physician training) added to this underlying capital. The value of physicians' underlying human capital is estimated by forecasting an age-earnings profile for doctors based on the characteristics in youth of NLSY cohort participants who subsequently became doctors. Published estimates are used to measure the total cost (wherever paid) of investments in physician training. These data are combined to compute the societal cost per primary care physician visit. The estimated societal cost per primary care physician visit is much higher than the average co-payment per primary care service and generally higher than the current Medicare compensation rate per service unit The private return to primary care physician training is relatively low, in the range of 7-9%. At current levels of supply, the marginal social costs of primary care visits appear to be equal to or greater than marginal social benefits. ER -