Volume 4, Issue 1

Many studies have estimated the cost of smoking. In recent years, such estimates have been widely used in litigation against the tobacco companies. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional methods have been used. On balance, the longitudinal approach, the one used in this study, is much preferable since one can account for the effects of smoking on the pool of eligibles rather than just conditioning expenditures on being eligible. We used data from four waves of the Health and Retirement Study to assess the impact of smoking on use of hospital and physicians’ services and nursing home care. The analysis was limited to utilization among persons aged 51 to 67 (“near elderly” ). During this phase of the life cycle, many adverse effects of smoking, measured in terms of mortality and morbidity,

The literature on the health economics of smoking presents two principal facts: (1) that smoking increases health care costs and (2) that restrictions on smoking lead to reductions in smoking prevalence and intensity. Some researchers have hypothesized that these two facts, in combination, allow the inference that restricting smoking will lower health care costs. For various reasons, however, observed associations between smoking and health care use on the one hand, and regulations and smoking on the other, do not imply a causal effect of the restrictions on health care.This article extends the literature by examining whether cigarette tax increases lead to lower health care costs. Using data from the 1991 and 1993 National Health Interview Surveys, it fi

Concern about the effect of aging on long-term care has intensi

Despite widely publicized changes in attitudes toward the care of the dying and rapid growth in hospice care and other services targeted toward the dying, a remarkably stable 30 percent of total Medicare expenditures is spent on the 5 percent of Medicare bene

Economists have long suggested that to be reliable, a preferred medical care price index should employ time-varying weights to measure outcomes-adjusted changes in the price of treating an episode of illness. In this article, we report on several years of research developing alternative indexes for the treatment of the acute phase of major depression, for the period 1991–1996. The introduction of new treatment technologies in the past two decades suggests well-known measurement issues may be prominent in constructing such a price index.We report on the results of four successively re