BACKGROUND This study examines whether bed days are alternative methods to medical care use for treating a particular illness. If bed days at home are considered as an alternative to medical treatment, then medical care use and bed days at home should be influenced by an individual's health insurance status. METHOD This study uses data from the 2003 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) on ...

The burgeoning growth of health care spending has become a major concern to policy makers, making the modeling of health care expenditure valuable in their decisionmaking processes. The challenges of health care expenditure analysis are two-fold: the exceptional skewness of its distribution as the top 5% of the population accounted for almost half of all spending and its heteroscedasticity. To ...

Based on data from the National Medical Care Utilization and Expenditure Survey, the 10 percent of the noninstitutionalized U.S. population that incurred the highest medical care charges was responsible for 75 percent of all incurred charges. Health status was the strongest predictor of high-cost use, followed by economic factors. Persons 65 years of age or over incurred far higher costs than y...

This analysis was conducted to determine how personal and community characteristics affect coverage by private insurance to supplement Medicare. Data from the 1980 National Medical Care Utilization and Expenditure Survey were used. After controlling for health status, it was found that supplemental coverage was positively associated with education, income, number of self-reported chronic condit...

BACKGROUND The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 requires drug plan sponsors to provide medication therapy management programs (MTMPs) to beneficiaries with (1) drug expenditures above $4,000, (2) multiple comorbidities, and (3) multiple prescription drugs. The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is a national probability survey conducted annually by the Agency for Healthcare Research and ...

This article compares 1996 estimates of national medical care expenditures from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and the National Health Accounts (NHA). The MEPS estimate for total expenditures in 1996 was $548 billion; whereas, the NHA estimate for personal health care (PHC) in 1996 was $912 billion. Much of this apparent difference, however, arises from differences in scope between...

Both clinical diagnoses and self-rated measures of mental illness are associated with a variety of outcomes, including physical well-being, health utilization, and expenditure. However, much of current literature primarily utilizes clinically diagnosed data. This cross-sectional study explores the impact of mental illness and health care expenditure using 2 self-rated measures: self-rated measu...

background: according to the important role of health care apprentice program on medical students’ performance, especially in relation with social accountability of medical education, it is attempted to assess efficacy of health care apprentice program on the level of medical students’ knowledge and skills in the context of primary health care at babol university of medial sciences    methods: ...