Traditional Medicare Versus Private Insurance: How Spending, Volume, And Price Change At Age Sixty-Five.

ABSTRACT: To slow the growth of Medicare spending, some policy makers have advocated raising the Medicare eligibility age from the current sixty-five years to sixty-seven years. For the majority of affected adults, this would delay entry into Medicare and increase the time they are covered by private insurance. Despite its policy importance, little is known about how such a change would affect national health care spending, which is the sum of health care spending for all consumers and payers-including governments. We examined how spending differed between Medicare and private insurance using longitudinal data on imaging and procedures for a national cohort of individuals who switched from private insurance to Medicare at age sixty-five. Using a regression discontinuity design, we found that spendin

SUBMITTER: Wallace J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4943661 | biostudies-literature | 2016 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature