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

Although broad trends in medical spending in the U.S. over the last decade have received widespread attention from policymakers, very little attention has focused on the components of those changes. For many other industries, economists typically divide nominal expenditures by an official...

In this paper we focus on a mystery we uncovered while undertaking a detailed audit of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index (PPl). We summarize our puzzle as follows. From January 1984 through December 1989.the BLS price Index for SIC 28341 (prescription pharmaceutical...