Denton Frank T, Gafni Amiram, Spencer Byron G
Department of Economics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont., Canada.
J Health Econ. 2002 Sep;21(5):781-803. doi: 10.1016/s0167-6296(02)00013-9.
The effects of population aging on future health care costs are an important public policy concern in many countries. We focus in this paper on physician services and investigate how changes in the size and age distribution of a population can affect the aggregate and per capita costs of such services. The principal data set (unpublished, for Ontario) provides information about payments to physicians, by age and sex of patients. Using it, we derive age/cost profiles for 19 categories of physicians. Adopting an index-theoretic framework, we then use the profiles to analyse the "pure" effects of population change (historical and projected) on physician costs, and to decompose the effects into population growth effects and population aging effects. We present calculations for Ontario, for the population of 15 industrialized countries, and for four theoretical populations.
人口老龄化对未来医疗保健成本的影响是许多国家重要的公共政策关注点。在本文中，我们聚焦于医生服务，并研究人口规模和年龄分布的变化如何影响此类服务的总费用和人均费用。主要数据集（未发表，关于安大略省）提供了按患者年龄和性别划分的医生薪酬信息。利用该数据集，我们得出了19类医生的年龄/成本概况。采用指数理论框架，我们随后利用这些概况分析人口变化（历史和预测）对医生成本的“纯粹”影响，并将这些影响分解为人口增长影响和人口老龄化影响。我们给出了安大略省、15个工业化国家的人口以及四个理论人口的计算结果。
