As a key component of health care, a full understanding of how much is spent on prescription medicines is increasingly important. Only a partial understanding of total expenditures across health systems is currently possible, as reporting is often limited to medicines dispensed in community...

This paper analyses the Slovak health insurance system and the policy challenges it faces. It describes the structure of health coverage and health sector reforms being implemented by the Slovak government. It provides a preliminary assessment of the possible impact of such reforms, with a focus...

While France has a universal public health insurance system, the coverage it provides is incomplete and the vast majority the French population has private complementary health insurance. Among OECD countries, the share of health care financed by private insurance is third highest behind the US...

This study updates and extends a previous study on equity in physician utilisation for a subset of the countries analyzed here (Van Doorslaer, Koolman and Puffer, 2002). It updates results to 2000 for 13 countries and adds new results for eight countries: Australia, Finland, France, Hungary,...

Cost-effectiveness analysis is versatile and used widely to assist in health care decision making. This chapter discusses how cost-effectiveness analysis is used at the system or national level, particularly in the domain of coverage and payment policy. We describe its relationship to other...

Major disparities in the cost of health care have made the pricing of specialist and hospital services a contentious issue in South Africa, particularly in the private sector. To help inform policy debate, this paper profiles selected experiences on the pricing of health services, competition...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

Moral hazard and provider-induced demand may contribute to overutilization of scarce health care resources. The U.S. health care system includes several compensatory cost-containment mechanisms, but their effects depend on how patients and providers respond. We investigate hospice programs'...

The Ageing-Related Diseases study compares health care systems by examining treatment trends and health outcomes on a disease-by-disease basis. Most of the day-to-day decisions that determine health care system performance are made in treating specific diseases. Therefore, the ARD’s bottom-up...

The Ageing-Related Diseases study compares treatment trends and health outcomes on a disease-by-disease basis. Most of the day-to-day decisions that determine health care system performance are made in treating specific diseases. Therefore, the ARD’s bottom-up approach to comparing health care...