Liu K, Wall S, Wissoker D
Urban Institute, Washington, DC 20037, USA.
Milbank Q. 1997;75(4):461-93. doi: 10.1111/1468-0009.00066.
Widely studied as a predictor of long-term care use, functional disability is also an important explanatory variable for acute care costs spent for the elderly. As policy makers contemplate ways to control rapidly growing Medicare expenditures, such as increasing the enrollment of beneficiaries into managed care programs, knowledge about the relation between functional disability and Medicare costs is likely to become more important for the design of program features. The research described here uses data from the new Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey to estimate the relation between functional disability and Medicare costs, the effects on costs of interactions between disability and other personal characteristics of beneficiaries, and changes in the level of disability and Medicare costs.
功能残疾作为长期护理使用的预测指标已得到广泛研究，它也是老年人急性护理费用的一个重要解释变量。随着政策制定者思考控制快速增长的医疗保险支出的方法，比如增加受益人加入管理式医疗计划的人数，对于计划特征设计而言，了解功能残疾与医疗保险费用之间的关系可能会变得更加重要。此处描述的研究使用了新的医疗保险当前受益人调查的数据，来估计功能残疾与医疗保险费用之间的关系、残疾与受益人其他个人特征之间的相互作用对费用的影响，以及残疾水平和医疗保险费用的变化。
