title: Challenges in building disease-based national health accounts.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Measuring spending on diseases is critical to assessing the value of medical care.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To review the current state of cost of illness estimation methods, identifying their strengths, limitations, and uses. We briefly describe the current National Health Expenditure Accounts, and then go on to discuss the addition of cost of illness estimation to the National Health Expenditure Accounts.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Recommendations are made for future research aimed at identifying the best methods for developing and using disease-based national health accounts to optimize the information available to policy makers as they struggle with difficult resource allocation decisions.
authors.affiliation: Division of General Medicine, University of Michigan School of Medicine, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. abrosen@umich.edu
authors.forename: Allison B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Rosen
authors.forename: David M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Cutler
mesh_terms: D002908:Chronic Disease / Q000145:classification / Q000191:economics; D017281:Cost of Illness; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D017048:Health Care Costs; D005102:Health Expenditures; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D006278:Medicare; D017059:Models, Econometric; D014481:United States