Applying Beta-type Size Distributions to Healthcare Cost Regressions

This paper extends the literature on modelling healthcare cost data by applying the Generalised Beta of the Second Kind (GB2) distribution to UK data. A quasi-experimental design, estimating models on a subset of the data and evaluating performance on another subset, is used to compare this distribution with its nested and limiting cases. We nd that the GB2 may be a useful tool for choosing an appropriate distribution to apply, with the Beta-2 (B2) distribution and Generalised Gamma (GG) distribution performing the best with this dataset.