Home Care Reimbursement, Long-term Care Utilization, And Health Outcomes
| dc.contributor.author | McKnight, Robin | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2004-10-24T14:54:24Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2004-10-24T14:54:24Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2004-03 | |
| dc.description | 52 p. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Long-term care currently comprises almost 10% of national health expenditures and is projected to rise rapidly over coming decades. A key, and relatively poorly understood, element of long-term care is home health care. I use a substantial change in Medicare reimbursement policy, which took the form of tightly binding average per-patient reimbursement caps, to address several questions about the market for home care. I find that the reimbursement change was associated with a large drop in the provision of home care. This drop was concentrated among unhealthy beneficiaries, which is consistent with the incentives for patient selection inherent in the per-patient caps. I find that the decline in home health utilization was not offset by increases in institutional long-term care or other medical care and that there were no associated adverse health consequences. However, approximately one-quarter of the decline in Medicare spending was offset by increases in out-of-pocket expenditures for home health care, with the offset concentrated in higher income populations. Despite the value of home health care implied by the out-of-pocket expenditures, I find that the welfare implications of the reimbursement change were ambiguous. | en |
| dc.description.sponsorship | National Institute on Aging, Grant #K12-AG00983 to the National Bureau of Economic Research | en |
| dc.format.extent | 175703 bytes | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/239 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics | en |
| dc.relation.ispartofseries | University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers;2004-6 | |
| dc.subject | Home heath care | en |
| dc.subject | Long-term care | en |
| dc.subject | National health expenditures | en |
| dc.subject | Medicare reimbursement policy | en |
| dc.title | Home Care Reimbursement, Long-term Care Utilization, And Health Outcomes | en |
| dc.type | Working Paper | en |