Improving Health Care Cost Projections for the Medicare Population Summary of a Workshop (2010) / Chapter Skim
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5 Participants' Views on Needed Research
5 Participants' Views on Needed Research
Pages 65-76
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From page 65... ...
A general discussion followed on what many participants viewed as some of the more fruitful priorities for needed research on aging-related issues with the goal of improving health care cost projections. OPENING REMARkS Eileen Crimmins (University of Southern California)
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But the experience of the 1970s departed radically from model forecasts and cast considerable doubt on the notion of a single, unified model that could explain all economic phenomena. Similarly, it is no longer thought that one model will unify everything one needs to know about the health care system.
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From page 67... ...
Most of the discussion focused on three areas: the need for a plurality of models, data collection versus research, and the value of cross-national comparisons. Policy Versus Research Needs Dana Goldman opened the discussion by commenting that there is a 14-year difference in life expectancy between a black man with 0 to 8 years of education and a white man with 13 or more years of education.
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From page 68... ...
He mentioned that Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, DC, was planning to add more beds and make all rooms singles, saying that it is a standard of care. Defining single rooms as a standard of care seems to be consumption, and consumption is financed in a number of ways: through tax-exempt financing of all hospital construction, through flexible health benefit plans, or through the tax exemption of employer insurance.
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NIA is also trying to leverage funds. For example, the Social Security Administration has co-funded some of NIA's retirement modeling efforts, and there is good collaboration between the two agencies.
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health care system. Something is known about Medicare, but there are no good answers to such questions as: What are the principal reasons why health care costs have gone up and have doubled in the last 12 years?
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With regard to the differences in spending between the United States and the OECD, Mark Freeland mentioned an analysis by Victor Fuchs over an a decade ago that found that, for the non-aged, the United States and the other countries spend about the same per capita; all of the differences come basically with the aged. Freeland also observed that much has been said during the day about the health care system but not much about the production of health -- in other words, all of the nonhealth care interventions that cause changes in health status.
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Clearly, a large number of research issues surfaced over the course of the day, ranging from the macro issue of the impact of growing investment in the health care sector on the
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He stressed that at some point certainly one must connect these issues with retirement issues and forecasting retirement and labor force participation. The value of international comparative studies seems incontrovertible based on the Gruber-Wise papers and volumes on comparing the impact of public pensions on how long people stay in the workforce and whether, in fact, old people staying in the workforce reduce jobs available for younger people (Gruber and Wise, 1999)
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Similarly, there is a body of evidence about the importance of family structure and social contacts, which could provide additional variables that could ultimately relate to health care costs. One thing the research community can do is to assist modelers in the design of data collection.
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The passage of health care reform is really the beginning and not the end of all of the issues that will be coming up as people try to see what does and does not work.
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