Reference Health and the Demand for Medical Care
提出前期健康（参照健康）对医疗需求有理论和实证影响，使用条件密度估计器发现参照健康能解释相同健康水平下的支出差异，忽略它会低估健康老龄化举措的潜在成本节约50%。
We propose that health in prior periods, termed reference health, is theoretically and empirically relevant to the demand for medical care. To address non‐normality in the distributions of medical care spending, consumption, and health, we use a conditional density estimator nested in a finite mixture framework. We find that reference health can help explain the variation in spending among individuals with the same contemporaneous health, particularly in the top tail of the spending distribution. We demonstrate that omitting reference health understates the potential cost‐savings of healthy aging initiatives by 50%.