TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cutler, David M
AU  - Meara, Ellen
TI  - The Medical Costs of The Young and Old: A Forty Year Perspective
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6114
PY  - 1997
Y2  - July 1997
DO  - 10.3386/w6114
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6114
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6114.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David M. Cutler
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1875 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/496-5216
Fax: 617/496-8951
E-Mail: dcutler@harvard.edu

Ellen Meara
Department of Health Management and Policy
677 Huntington Avenue
Kresge 404
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617/432-4325
E-Mail: emeara@hsph.harvard.edu
M1  - published as David M. Cutler, Ellen Meara. "The Medical Costs of the Young and Old: A Forty-Year Perspective," in David A. Wise, editor, "Frontiers in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press (1998)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 1997-12-01
AB  - In this paper, we examine the growth in medical care spending by age over the past 40 years.  We show that between 1953 and 1987, medical spending increased disproportionately for infants, those under 1 year, and the elderly, those 65 and older. Annual spending growth for infants was 9.8 percent and growth for the elderly was 8.0 percent compared to 4.7 percent for people aged 1-64.  Within the infant and the elderly population, excess spending growth was largely driven by more rapid growth of spending at the top of the medical spending distribution. Aggregate changes in outcomes for infants and the elderly are consistent with these changes in spending growth, but we do not present any causal evidence on this point.
ER  -