The effect of measurement error on differences in hospital expenditures.
Differences in expenditures for medical care among various subgroups in the population according to age, income, residence, and ethnicity have important public policy implications. However, few efforts have been made to assess the extent to which these apparent differences among subgroups observed in social surveys may be influenced by measurement error. This paper provides a framework for examining the impact of various kinds of error including random error and biases. The framework is applied to data on hospital expenditures from a national survey of health services expenditure which includes in addition to consumer reports, verifying information from hospitals, physicians, and third-party payers who provided services to persons in the sample. Differential error according to demographic and social characteristics is estimated. The impact of such differential error on conclusions about the distribution of health resources is discussed.
D000367:Age Factors; D005006:Ethnicity; D005249:Fees and Charges; D005102:Health Expenditures; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011159:Population Surveillance; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012494:Sampling Studies; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D014481:United States