Explaining individual, regional, and provider variation in health care spending is of enormous value to policymakers, but is often hampered by the lack of individual level detail in universal public health systems because budgeted spending is often not attributable to specific individuals. Even...

Risk adjustment deters selection and helps to assure fair and efficient payments among health insurers or capitated provider groups. However, since conventional risk adjustment allocates funds among insurers or regions according to current population health status, it does not reward — indeed,...

There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., OLS on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional...