Strengthening National Data to Better Measure What We Are Buying in Health Care: Reconciling National Health Expenditures with Detailed Survey Data

As health care financing, organization, and delivery innovations proliferate, the need for comprehensive, detailed data on medical spending has never been more apparent. This study builds on previous work to provide a more comprehensive accounting of medical spending at the individual level than has been done in the past. We account for spending by the entire population: the civilian, non-institutionalized population that is the subject of past studies, as well as high medical spenders, the institutionalized, the incarcerated, and active-duty military personnel. We use within-imputation and other adjustments to build a micro dataset and reconcile survey data based on our estimate of medical spending to the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA). The micro dataset we build can be used for more detailed policy evaluations that more closely reflect true national personal health expenditure at the individual level.