Our goal was to measure
the premium for a standardized package of health benefits forworkers
ages nineteen to sixty-four in each year from 1979 through 1995.
Unfortunately, no nationally reliable data provide direct estimates
of this amount. Instead, we used data from the National Health
Accounts (supplied by the Office of the Actuary at the Health Care
Financing Administration), supplemented by data from the 1977
National Medical Care Expenditure Survey (NMCES), the 1987 National
Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES), and the CPS to estimate
the total spent on a standard benefit package for our subset of
workers in each year. We then divided by the CPS estimate of
insured adults to estimate the price of services per person.