Author Description

The medical-care sector often experiences changes in medical protocols and technologies that cause shifts in treatments. However, the commonly used medicalcare price indexes reported by the BLS hold the mix of medical services Öxed. In contrast, episode expenditure indexes, advocated by many health economists, track the full cost of disease treatment, even as treatments shift across service categories (e.g., inpatient to outpatient hospital). In our data, we Önd that these two conceptually di§erent measures of price growth show similar aggregate rates of ináation. Although aggregate trends are similar, we observe di§erences when looking at speciÖc disease categories that have implications for the productivity of disease treatment.