Medical care services are time-intensive in the sense that, other things being equal, the level of utilization depends on the amount of time that consumers are ready to allocate to their consumption. This amount depends on the competing uses of time, and economic theory predicts that time has the same constraining effect on the demand for medical care as income and money prices. The rationing effect of economic variables in general and time prices in particular is more apparent when medical treatments are provided for non-urgent health problems than if medical services are rendered in situations of life-threatening, debilitating, or severe though transitory illnesses. Therefore, the proposed study focuses on ambulatory physician care of persons who are not hindered from work by poor health. It plans to investigate the effect on medical care utilization by the elderly of easing the time constraints due to the additional amount of own (non-labor market) time available to older workers when they shift to part-time work or stop working altogether. The study will be based on several interview waves of the longitudinal Social Security Retirement History Survey, and it will test the hypothesis that more available own-time increases the probability of seeking care and the amount of medical care utilization; if this hypothesis is not rejected, the findings from the proposed study will show the magnitudes of the effect of own-time on the probability of seeking physician services and the level of their utilization. These findings are relevant to public policy because they will assess the degree of restraint on government expenditures for health care programs that can be attained without, in the process, halting or reversing the outcome of lowered mortality rates which have constituted a major achievement of expanded medical care utilization.
