Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs.

• Position: NBER Books

Edited by Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt, and David M. Cutler

512 pages, 62 line drawings, 113 tables

$130 (cloth)

Health care costs represent nearly 18 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and 20 percent of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health.

The research in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs seeks to connect our knowledge of expenditures with what we are able to measure of results, probing questions of methodology, changes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the shifting landscape of physician practice. Some examples: research in this volume investigates...