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Monthly Labor Review, February 2010

March 15 2010

Monthly Labor Review, February 2010 Established in 1915, Monthly Labor Review is the principal journal of fact, analysis, and research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor.

Each month, economists, statisticians, and experts from the Bureau join with private sector professionals and State and local government specialists to provide a wealth of research in a wide variety of fields—the labor force, the economy, employment, inflation, productivity, occupational injuries and illnesses, wages, prices, and many more.

Out-of-pocket health care expenditures: a comparison 3
An examination of health care expenditures reveals a lack of agreement in the estimates of three different data sources, as well as methodological differences among those sources
Ann C. Foster

Producing disease-based price indexes 20
Both productivity gains and substitutions toward less expensive services have reduced the total price of health care, but these savings have not led to lower patient costs
Ralph Bradley, Elaine Cardenas, Daniel H. Ginsburg, Lyubov Rozental, and Frankie Velez

New expenditure data in the PSID: comparisons with the CE 29
A look into data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics indicates a close alignment with corresponding measures from the Consumer Expenditure Survey
Geng Li, Robert F. Schoeni, Sheldon Danziger, and Kerwin Kofi Charles

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Out-of-pocket health care expenditures: a comparison
An examination of aggregate out-of-pocket health care expenditures from the CE, MEPS, and the NHEA for the 1996–2006 period indicates that methodological differences account for the lack of agreement among estimates

Health care expenditure data produced by the Federal Government come from a variety of data sources, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE), the household component of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS-HC) of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) of the DHHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The purpose of this article is to examine annual aggregate CE, MEPS, and NHEA out-of-pocket health care expenditures for comparable categories from 1996 to 2006 to determine whether they are consistent across the three data sources.

The CE collects information about outof-pocket spending on health care and other expenses from consumer units throughout the United States. The MEPS-HC collects nationwide data on the cost and use of health care and on health insurance coverage at the household and the individual level. The NHEA are the official estimates of total health care spending in the United States. The NHEA measure aggregate annual expenditures for health care goods and services, public-health activities, program administration, and research and other investment related to health care, as well as the net cost of private insurance.

The PCE measure the market value of health care and other goods and services purchased by the “personal sector” of the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Income and Product Accounts. Data for the NHEA and the PCE are obtained from secondary sources. Although health insurance premiums are a major part of household health care spending, they will not be examined in this article because the MEPS data that were used did not provide the information needed for the research undertaken.

The first section of the article compares and contrasts the content and methodology of the CE, MEPS, and NHEA. The next section describes the methods to be used subsequently to carry out the comparison, including spending category alignment, population adjustment, and expenditure computation. Then, the relevant findings from the analysis are presented and examined, followed by conclusions and implications. ...

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