TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bernard, Didem
AU  - Selden, Thomas
AU  - Pylypchuk, Yuriy
TI  - The Distribution of Public Spending for Health Care in the United States on the Eve of Health Reform
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 23150
PY  - 2017
Y2  - February 2017
DO  - 10.3386/w23150
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23150
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23150.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Didem Bernard
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Center for Financing, Access, and Cost Trends
540 Gaither Road
Rockville, MD 20850
E-Mail: Didem.bernard@ahrq.hhs.gov

Thomas Selden
540 Gaither Road
Rockville, MD 20850
E-Mail: Thomas.Selden@ahrq.hhs.gov

Yuriy Pylypchuk
Office of the National Coordinator
for Health Information Technology 
330 C St SW
Washington, DC 20024
Tel: 202-774-2428 
E-Mail: Yuriy.Pylypchuk@hhs.gov
M1  - published as Didem Bernard, Thomas Selden, Yuriy Pylypchuk. "The Distribution of Public Spending for Health Care in the United States on the Eve of Health Reform," in Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt, and David M. Cutler, editors, "Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs" University of Chicago Press (2018)

M3  - presented at "Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs", October 18-19, 2013
AB  - U.S. health care spending in 2012 totaled $2.8 trillion or 17.2 percent of gross domestic product. Given the magnitude of health care spending, the large public sector role in health care, and the reforms being implemented under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), we believe it useful to examine several basic questions: What was the public share of national spending on the eve of reform? How has the public share evolved over time? And how are the benefits of public spending on health care distributed within the population by age, poverty level, insurance coverage, health status, and ACA-relevant subgroups? The questions we pose, while basic, cannot be answered with commonly-available statistics due to the sheer complexity of health care financing in the U.S. The objective of this paper is to provide answers by combining aggregate measures from the National Health Expenditure Accounts with micro-data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.
ER  -