The Concentration of Hospital-Based Medical Spending: Evidence from Canada

Aurelie Côté-Sergent, Damien Échevin and Pierre-Carl Michaud

Cahiers de recherche from Chaire de recherche Industrielle Alliance sur les enjeux économiques des changements démographiques

Abstract: In this paper, we present evidence on the concentration of hospital-based medical spending in Canada. We use longitudinal administrative data from the province of Quebec to document how medical spending is concentrated cross-sectionally, over time and finally near the end-of-life when death occurs at the hospital. Average expenditures rise rapidly with age, starting around the age of 50, and are concentrated in a small fraction of high-cost users. For example, the top 1% of men and women in terms of hospital spending account for 55.5% and 54.8% of total spending respectively. Persistence among high-users is rather low. Fewer than 3% of those in the top quintile of hospital spending stay in the same quintile the following year, fewer than 5% have any spending the following year. Finally, hospital spending among those in their last year of life and who die at the hospital can account for 11.1% of total hospital spending in the population. Most of that end-of-life spending, more than 80%, occurs in the last month of life.

Keywords: Medical spending; concentration; end-of-life. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cedia.ca/sites/cedia.ca/files/cahier_15-13_healthcosts.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Internal Server Error

Related works:
Journal Article: The Concentration of Hospital‐Based Medical Spending: Evidence from Canada (2016)
Working Paper: The concentration of hospital-based medical spending: evidence from Canada (2015)
Working Paper: The Concentration of Hospital-Based Medical Spending: Evidence from Canada? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lvl:criacr:1513

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from Chaire de recherche Industrielle Alliance sur les enjeux économiques des changements démographiques Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().