Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient? Evidence from Prescription Drugs
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aer.p20171086.pdf
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550.04 KB
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Author(s)
Kyle, Margaret
Williams, Heidi L
Date Issued
May 2017
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Kyle, Margaret, and Heidi Williams. “Is American Health Care Uniquely Inefficient? Evidence from Prescription Drugs.” American Economic Review 107, no. 5 (May 2017): 486–490. © 2017 American Economic Association
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Alan Garber and Jonathan Skinner (2008) famously conjectured that the US health care system was "uniquely inefficient" relative to other countries. We test this idea using cross-country data on prescription drug sales newly linked with an arguably objective measure of relative therapeutic benefits, or drug quality. Specifically, we investigate how higher and lower quality drugs diffuse in the US relative to Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and the UK. Our tabulations suggest that lower quality drugs diffuse more in the US relative to high quality drugs compared to each of our four comparison countries--consistent with Garber and Skinner's conjecture.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1257/AER.P20171086
