TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bernard,Didem
AU  - Selden,Thomas
AU  - Pylypchuk,Yuriy
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Distribution of Public Spending for Health Care in the United States on the Eve of Health Reform
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2017///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - February 2017; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w23150
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w23150
ER  -