Abstract
U.S. health care is often seen as an outlier, with high costs and only middling outcomes. This view implies a household production function for health, with both health care and lifestyle serving as inputs. Building on earlier work by Miller and Frech (2004), we make this argument explicit by estimating a production function from augmented OECD data. This allows us to determine whether the U.S. is literally an outlier; which turns on whether the United States is very far off the production surface. We find that the Unites States is somewhat less productive than the average OECD country, but that a substantial part of the observed difference results from poor lifestyle choices, particularly obesity.
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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at UCLA on May 29, 2003 and at a Conference on Health and Economic Policy in Munich, Germany on June 27, 2003. Thanks are due to the participants of those sessions for helpful comments, and especially to Tom Rice at UCLA. We also appreciate the excellent research assistance of Andrea Lehman.
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Comanor, W.S., Frech, H.E. & Miller, R.D. Is the United States an outlier in health care and health outcomes? A preliminary analysis. Int J Health Care Finance Econ 6, 3–23 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-006-6863-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-006-6863-8