Premium
Disability indices, the economic costs of illness, and social insurance: The case of multiple sclerosis
Author(s) -
P. Inman Robert
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
acta neurologica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.967
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1600-0404
pISSN - 0001-6314
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0404.1984.tb02552.x
Subject(s) - interim , social insurance , disability insurance , actuarial science , compensation (psychology) , catastrophic illness , index (typography) , multiple sclerosis , economic cost , mental illness , psychiatry , medicine , psychology , economics , political science , social psychology , social security , neoclassical economics , oncology , world wide web , computer science , mental health , law , market economy
Debilitating, long‐term illness can impose a significant economic hardship on families afflicted with the illness and on the wider society as well. In addition to medical research to find a cure or a prevention for such illnesses, society may wish, in the interim, to allocate resources to compensate the families burdened by the illness for the economic losses they have suffered. Such compensation will take the form of a social insurance program. The socially optimal insurance program requires two crucial pieces of information: (i) an index of physical disability and (ii) an accurate assessment of the economic losses associated with each stage of disability as measured by that index. This paper reports on an initial attempt using U.S. data to provide these two important facts for one long‐term, disabling illness: multiple sclerosis.