Health Care Satellite Account

Background and BEA's Plans

As the economic importance of health care spending grows, BEA plans to construct a satellite account for health care spending that would allow analysts to better assess the returns to treatments of disease and the sources of changes in health care costs.

• Toward a Health Care Satellite Account (PDF • 120 KB)

Presentations from the May 2007 BEA Advisory Committee:

• Toward a Satellite Account for Health, by Ana Aizcorbe (PDF • 1,883 KB)
• Episode-Based Price Indexes: Plans and Progress, by Ana Aizcorbe (PDF • 1,816 KB)

Research on Price Indexes for Health Care Spending

A look into the ongoing research at BEA toward developing price indexes that reflect the effects of substitution in health care spending. The new indexes measure spending on bundles of treatments for diseases rather than spending on individual treatments.

• Summary (PDF • 134 KB)
• BEA Working Paper: The Importance of Pricing the Bundle of Treatments (WP2008-04)
  Abstract (PDF • 51 KB) | Full Paper (PDF • 162 KB) | Appendix (XLS • 356 KB) | by Ana Aizcorbe and Nicole Nestoriak* | July 2008
  *Bureau of Labor Statistics