| Sumario: | Although not all of us are health economists, we are individuals who engage in health-related consumption, so let us take some time to think about how or where health enters into our decision-making about medical care consumption. A picture (Figure 1) might help distinguish different health-related concepts: health stock, health depreciation, health inputs, health shocks, and health flows. The available data might allow for differentiation between one's health stock entering period I t i and health shocks in time I t i , such that we can examine the effects of health on medical care consumption behavior, and the effects of medical care consumption on subsequent health, more finely. Perhaps, then, the developers of the algorithm were using past utilization to predict health (or health need) since medical care is an input in the health production process.
|
|---|