Date and Time
June 18, 2003
1:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Dana Goldman, PhD - Director, Program in Health Economics at RAND Corporation and Adjunct Associate Professor of Health Services & Radiology at University of California, Los Angeles

There are persistent and large differences in health outcomes by socioeconomic status that cannot be fully explained by traditional arguments. Furthermore, these gradients are larger among the chronically ill. In previous work, Goldman considered a novel explanation for socioeconomic health disparities among the chronically ill: better self-management of disease by the more educated. Using data from both social science surveys and clinical trials, Goldman showed that the ability to maintain a better health regimen is an important independent determinant of subsequent health outcomes. Since this ability varies systematically across schooling groups, self-maintenance is an important reason for the very steep SES health gradient in chronic disease. In this talk, Goldman will review this evidence and present an economic model to explain how new medical technology will affect SES health gradients. The model provides some key empirical implications without requiring a specific causal link between education and health, including the somewhat counterintuitive finding that new technologies tend to increase health disparities. This hypothesis and others are tested using data on HIV and hypertension.