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Consumer Expenditure Surveys
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Division of Price and Index Number Research (DPINR) Consumption Symposium
Kevin Corinth - University of Chicago - kcorinth@uchicago.edu
While the importance of health insurance for well-being is widely recognized, there is less agreement on how to incorporate health insurance into a consumption measure. After arguing that health insurance, rather than health expenditures, is the proper resource to add to consumption, I outline an approach for incorporating a value of health insurance. I describe which health-related elements should be added to the consumption measure, the data sources that can be used to measure these elements, and methods to estimate a market value of health insurance for different individuals and insurance types. I then discuss considerations that should be informed by the purposes of a particular consumption measure, including whether to adjust health insurance values based on disability status, whether to adjust downward the value of health insurance for lower-income individuals, and whether to apply a different equivalence scale to health insurance than to other elements of consumption.
Last Modified Date: November 10, 2021