price_deflate: Deflate prices within a sector, relative to a base period.

In medicare: Tools for Obtaining and Cleaning Medicare Public Use Files

Description

CMS publishes yearly final rules that detail annual price increases across various sectors of healthcare spending. In order to analyze spending increases due to utilization changes, it is frequently useful to "deflate" spending based on a reference period, so that observed changes are not due to inflation.

Usage

price_deflate(current_value, sector, current_year, reference_year = 2007)

Arguments

current_value	The current value that is being deflated to reference-period-equivalent dollars
sector	What sector is being adjusted. Currently supports: ip, op, phys, snf, hh, hospice, part_b_drugs, part_d_drugs, dme, and other
current_year	The current year (2007 - 2014)
reference_year	The base period to standardize to (2007 - 2014).

Details

Most sectors come from annual Federal Register Final Rules. Example: Physician Fee Change Rules.

Exceptions are other, which uses the general CPI deflator, and part_d_drugs, which use the CPI-Pharmaceutical deflator.'

Value

A float value, current_value / (current year index / reference year index)

Examples

# convert $100 in current inpatient spending to year 2007 dollars
price_deflate(100, "ip", 2014, 2007) 

medicare documentation built on May 1, 2019, 10:19 p.m.