| Sumario: | This article comments on the issue of the rising price of physicians. The Feldstein demand model relates physicians' services per capita to net price (NP), the price of other goods, income per capita, and governmental provision of medical services per capita. Using a loglinear form, a positive coefficient is obtained for NP. After splitting NP into its two components, average price (AP) and insurance (Ins), Feldstein found AP to be insignificant while Ins was significant and positive. Researchers argued that a plausible explanation for his inability to estimate directly the parameters of the demand function was that at observed prices excess demand prevailed. The estimated coefficient of AP in this context would be the sum of his estimates for AP and Ins, while the estimated coefficient of NP is the negative of his estimated coefficient for Ins. If one perform this transformation, we find that the coefficient of AP is negative, while that of NP is positive. It is an open question as to whether Feldstein model's AP or NP should be considered the `true' price variable and this ambiguity stems, in our minds, from the rather strange definition of the demand curve.
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