Strategies for a BEA Satellite Health Care Account

In March 2008, the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies held a workshop to assist the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) with next steps as it develops plans to produce a satellite health care account. This account, designed to improve its measurement of economic activity in the medical care sector, will benefit health care policy.

The purpose of the workshop, summarized in this volume, was to elicit expert guidance on strategies to implement the objectives of the BEA program. The ultimate objectives of the program are to:

• compile medical care spending information by type of disease-a system more directly useful for measuring health care inputs, outputs, and productivity than current estimates of spending by type of provider;
• produce a comprehensive set of accounts for health care-sector income, expenditure, and product;
• develop medical care price and real output measures that will help analysts to break out changes in the delivery of health care from changes in the prices of that care;
• and coordinate BEA and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) health expenditure statistics.