The presentation of this paper is here.
Notes :
- 1 . How is health or medical care modelled in this paper. Why, merits and drawbacks.
Model medical care demand , not health directly . Use a specific functional form . The relationship between health care demand and health shocks is entirely pinned down by the utility function.
- 2. what is the timing of the model.
First period, observe the health shock. Choose among different insurance plans.
Second period, choose optimal amount of Q , conditional on insurance plan and shocks.
- 3. How is normalization done.
Not clear.
- 4. What are the estimated parameters.
Two parameters governing the distribution of shocks. Two parameters in the utility function . And parameters which are the coefficients of the individual characteristics.
- 5. How is the stochastic element modelled and why.
The only source of stochastic variation is the health shock.
- 6. How does this link to your model .
It’s not clear to me the relative merits of modelling either health or health care demand. Modelling health certainly involves the initial state of the health stock for each individual. And how the health care and shocks jointly affects the next period health care stock. (Review other papers who model health directly)
Other elements of the paper is very close to what I have in mind. Certainly, the simple model could not capture many important elements in the decision to get care. Dynamics, patient-doctor interactions, supply side are ignored.
Brief descriptions of what I have in mind.
First period, observe the shocks. Second period, choose how much to spend conditional on shocks and insurance plans. Individual characteristics should be considered in the utility functions.
- 7 . How is the model performance .
The targets are health care spending. From the table in the slides, the model seems to under-predict the number of zero care and over predicts the share of people who spend a lot.
- 8 . Why does the model perform so badly in matching the targets and how to improve the model .
Reflections 