Marital status and health care expenditures among the elderly in a managed care organization
Date
2003-07Author
Cabrera-Alonso, Juliana
Long, Michael J.
Bangalore, Vinay G
Lescoe-Long, Mary A.
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
The health care manager. 2003 Jul-Sep; 22(3): 249-55.
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship of marital status in and health care expenditures among the elderly in a managed care organization. The study population consisted of 277 functionally impaired elderly people who were 75 years and older enrolled in a managed care organization. In separate analyses, the relationship between marital status and total expenditure per enrollee, the number of outpatient visits, hospital admissions, and emergency department (ED) visits during the two-year study period was examined. The results indicate that married individuals had significantly higher health care expenditures than the unmarried. However, there were no significant differences in number of hospital admissions, number of outpatient visits, and number of ED visits. It would behoove health care administrators and policy makers to take into consideration marital status when planning, designing, and implementing health care policies for the elderly.
Description
The full text of this article is not available in SOAR. WSU users can access the article via commercial databases licensed by University Libraries: http://libcat.wichita.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=1326577. The URL of this article is: www.cinahl.com/cgi-bin/refsvc?jid=1894&accno=2004019977.