Professor Jeffrey Smith

There is little current information regarding the long-term persistence of health spending in the United States, in particular among the population aged under 65 (pre-Medicare eligibility). We describe and model the extent of persistence over a six-year period (2003–08) using medical and pharmacy claims for over 3 million employees, retirees and dependants derived from the Truven Health MarketScan database.

In this paper, we outline the rationale for the use of such measures in education, review the literature relating to several important problems associated with their use and argue that they nonetheless have a positive role to play in improving the quality of education.