Flat Fee Expenditures. The approach used to count expenditures for flat fees was to place the expenditure on the first visit of the flat fee group. The remaining visits have zero payments. Thus, if the first visit in the flat fee group occurred prior to 1998, all of the events that occurred in 1998 will have zero payments. Conversely, if the first event in the flat fee group occurred at the end of 1998, the total expenditure for the entire flat fee group will be on that event, regardless of the number of events it covered after 1998.
Flat Fee Expenditures. A flat fee is the fixed dollar amount a person is charged for a package of health care services provided during a defined period of time. Because MEPS does not collect flat fee information about home health events, there are no flat fee expenditure data included in this file.
