Figure 2.

Cost Calculation Algorithm – Explanation: Each patient had three follow-up visits. The interviewer asked patients to report their last month’s medical costs. The patients had the option to report the costs for up to three encounters. For MI and stroke, whose episodes began with an inpatient, we calculated the seasonal cost as the monthly cost of the disease after the episodes would vary with the intensity of services they received. The cost per episode of MI or stroke was the sum of the hospitalization cost and cost of care for three consecutive follow-up months. For all other diseases, we assumed slight month-to-month variation and scaled up the total cost of three months of care to get the annualized cost