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Unlike other aspects of American health experience, there is a current void of accurate statistics on expensive illness experiences. This paper is designed to fill this void. Accurate information will allow the development of an improved framework for discussions of the cost of national health insurance and methods of containing the growth of medical price inflation (insofar as it is affected by large medical expenses) and overall medical expenditure growth. This paper presents a preliminary cross-sectional analysis of the incidence and cost of catastrophic illness in the United States, where catastrophic illness is defined as an illness episode for which a person incurs 55000 or more of medical expenses in a calendar year. The following data are included in the profile: the incidence rate of a catastrophic illness, the average cost of a catastrophic episode, the total number of individuals who incur catastrophic expenses, and the total national cost of all catastrophic episodes. The demographic profile disaggregates these results by specific age, sex, income, and geographic region categories.

This paper estimates a multi-equation model of nursing home behavior using the 1973 NCHS National Nursing Home Survey for data. The paper investigates empirically the effects of public reimbursement and regulatory policies, as well as other exogenous factors, on the following dependent variables: (1) average operating cost; (2) nursing hours per patient-day; (3) an index of rehabilitation-type services; (4) the occupancy rate; (5) the mix of public and private patients; and (6) the rate charged to private patients. The results dramatize the importance of endogeneity concerns in nursing home behavior. Rate setting and many regulations are shown empirically to have unintended and often undesired consequences on cost and other policy criteria of interest. While there has been anecdotal evidence of such system-wide interdependencies, this study affirms that such possibilities must be taken seriously. Rational nursing home regulation cannot proceed apart from a comprehensive understanding of the nursing home behavioral environment.

Recent policy discussions of the distribution of earnings in the United States have emphasized the effect of formal education and other skill training programs. While the theoretical justification for this approach arises out of human capital analyses, the human capital analyses, as well as the more recent dual labor market analyses also emphasize that on-the-job training is a critical determinant of the income distribution [11; 8]. While a vital determinant of differentials in on-the-job training is the differences that exist between alternative job structures, there has been little analysis of the effect of the characteristics of particular jobs which individuals hold. Rather global measures of onthe-job training (such as years of experience in the labor force) typically are used to analyze the effect of labor market experience on the acquisition of marketable skills [11]. Yet, different "job experiences" obviously result in different types and amounts of on-the-job experience. This article is an attempt to clarify the nature of these differential effects of alternative job experiences by focusing on the effects of career origin on the acquisition of on-the-job training. Earnings differentials generated by on-the-job training in given occupational categories are generated. A central hypothesis is that failure to standardize for career origin incorrectly attributes earnings differentials to differences in formal education, rather than differences in on-the-job training. At least some of the problems in eval