Out-of-Pocket Medical Spending and Charon’s Obol

Out-of-pocket medical spending for care of chronic conditions.

We examined out-of-pocket medical spending by persons with and without chronic conditions using data from the 1996 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). Our results show that mean out-of-pocket spending increased with the number of chronic conditions. The level of this spending also varied by age and insurance coverage, among other characteristics. Out-of-pocket spending for prescription dru...

Medical Out - of - Pocket Spending Among the Uninsured : Differential Spending & the Supplemental Poverty Measure ∗

This paper refines the treatment of Medical Out-of-Pocket (MOOP) spending among the uninsured in measuring poverty, and investigates its net effect on the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). Unlike previous work, this research accounts for insurance coverage type in estimating counterfactual distributions of non-premium MOOP spending for the uninsured using predictive mean matching models. Addi...

Out-of-Pocket Health Care Spending and the Rural Underinsured

Does widowhood explain gender differences in out-of-pocket medical spending among the elderly?

Despite the presence of Medicare, out-of-pocket medical spending is a large expenditure risk facing the elderly. While women live longer than men, elderly women incur higher out-of-pocket medical spending than men at each age. In this paper, we examine whether differences in marital status and living arrangements can explain this difference. We find that out-of-pocket medical spending is approx...

Medicare Beneficiaries’ Out-of-Pocket Spending for Health Care

Medicare beneficiaries spent a median of $3,324 a year of their own money on health care in 2010. Ten percent of beneficiaries—almost 5 million people—spent more than $8,030. Half of all Medicare beneficiaries spent at least 16.4 percent of their income on health care. The burden of health care costs was particularly heavy for the sickest and oldest beneficiaries as well as for near-poor benefi...