We review in considerable detail the conceptual and measurement issues that underlie construction of medical care price indexes in the US, focusing in particular on the medical care consumer price indexes (MCPIs) and medical-related producer price indexes (MPPIs). We outline salient features of...

This paper examines the causes and consequences of reductions in cardiovascular disease mortality, and in particular heart attack mortality, over the past several decades. Analysis of data from Medicare and review of the clinical literature indicate that a large share of the recent decline in...

This article presents a theoretical and empirical discussion of how costs of outpatient medical practice vary with the size of the group providing services. It focuses upon the incentives of the individual physican to keep the costs of the practice down and his work effort high. Since cost and...

There are two types of selection models in the health economics literature. One focuses on choice between a fixed set of contracts. Consumers with greater demand for medical care services prefer contracts with more generous reimbursement, resulting in a suboptimal proportion of consumers in such...