| Title | An Ounce of Prevention at Half Price: Evaluating a Subsidy on Health Investments |
| Publication Type | Report |
| Year of Publication | 2015 |
| Authors | White, MN |
| Institution | Newark, DE, University of Delaware, Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics |
| Keywords | Consumption and Savings, Event History/Life Cycle, Health Conditions and Status |
| Abstract | This paper examines how investments in health, through spending on preventive care, affect subsequent spending on medical care among the retired population.Augmenting a traditional dynamic consumption-savings model with two medical care goods, I estimate a structural life cycle model using data on single retired Americans from the Health and Retirement Study; I then conduct policy counterfactuals to ascertain the effect of a subsidy on preventive care on health and fiscal outcomes. A narrowly targeted subsidy improves longevity by 0.76 months at a public cost of 760 per capita, but does not reduce lifetime demand for medical care. |
| Endnote Keywords | prevention/consumption/savings/life Cycle |
| Endnote ID | 999999 |
| Citation Key | 5884 |
