TY - BOOK AU - Newhouse,Joseph P. ED - Rand Corporation. ED - United States. ED - World Congress on Health Economics. TI - The demand for medical care services: a retrospect and prospect SN - 0833003038 AV - RA410.53 .N49 1981 PY - 1981/// CY - Santa Monica, CA PB - RAND KW - Medical care KW - Evaluation KW - Utilization KW - United States KW - Health Services Research N1 - "March 1981."; "This report was written as a survey paper for the World Congress on Health Economics, held at Leiden, the Netherlands, September 9-11, 1980"--Preface; Includes bibliographical references (p. 25-31); Also available on the internet via WWW in PDF format N2 - Surveys the literature on demand for medical care services and conjectures where the literature may go next. Although focus is on the response of demand to changes in cost sharing arrangements, several other determinants of demand are treated. Previous studies have used four sources of data: premium or claims information, natural experiments, comparison of demand of individuals with different insurance policies, and designed experiments. The advantages and drawbacks of using each of these sources are examined. Several frontiers of demand analysis are also discussed: specification of price, income, and health status variables; specification of the stochastic term and use of appropriate estimators; specification of the dependent variable; and the norms argument. The author concludes that whereas both conceptual and empirical knowledge are now much improved, the theory of both price and utilization at the market level is in need of further study UR - http://www.rand.org/publications/R/R2691/ ER -