The modern hospital is at once the site of healing, the locus of medical learning and a cornerstone of the welfare state. Its technological and infrastructural costs have transformed health services into one of today's fastest growing sectors, absorbing substantial proportions of national income...

Historically, the NHS did not routinely collect cost data, unlike many countries with private insurance markets. In 1998, for the first time the government mandated NHS trusts to submit estimates of their costs of service, known as reference costs. These have informed a wide range of health...

Background: Achieving equity in healthcare services has been a global priority. According to the literature, a slew of initiatives aimed at increasing household equity in healthcare fnancing have exacerbated the problem, making it hard for most developing countries to understand the real cause...

While mental health care has undergone substantial reforms, little attention has been paid to financing issues. This book addresses this shortcoming and brings more transparency into the complex relationship between mental health care reform, service provision and financing. Additionally, it...

Egypt and Cuba are both lower-middle income countries with a history of socialist rule and which have embarked on economic liberalisation since the 1990s. Health status in both countries is extremely different. While life expectancy of the Cuban population in all age-groups is similar to that of...

Financing the public health system represents a central reference point of the decisional algorithm necessary for ensuring an advanced management, in the sense that the purpose of this tactic is to analyse the current financial management, to formulate some observations and to present some...

From 2004 to 2012, the German social health insurance levied a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. We develop a new model for estimating the effect of such a co-payment on the individual number of visits per quarter. The model allows for a one time increase in the...