This report reviews the health economic research conducted at RAND and elsewhere in an effort to summarize what this research has to say about the elasticity of demand for health care and to consider how this set of results applies to the problem of estimating the demand for health care that is provided by the Department of Defense to military members, their families, and retirees.
The work reported here was sponsored by PA&E and was carried out jointly by RAND Health’s Center for Military Health Policy Research and the Forces and Resources Policy Center of the National Defense Research Institute. The latter is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the unified commands, and the defense agencies.