MEDICAL DEMAND: Health Care Elasticity

DEFINITION

By Staff Reporters

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Classic: Despite a wide variety of empirical methods and data sources, the demand for health care is consistently found to be price inelastic

Modern: If you are sick, you will not be very price sensitive. There are exceptions to this rule (e.g., elective surgery such as plastic surgery, purchases of eyeglasses) but most studies find that patients are fairly insensitive to changes in health care prices.

Examples: For instance, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment found that the price elasticity of medical expenditures is -0.2.

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