This paper investigates the determinants of the prices of branded prescription medicines across different regulatory settings and health care systems, taking into account their launch date, patent status, market dynamics and the regulatory context in which they diffuse. By using volume-weighted...

The size of national health care expenditure is an important research and policy issue. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical analyses of an implied optimal size for a health sector. Various economic theories are explicitly or implicitly invoked, but none is fully satisfactory. Theory...

To overcome the problem of insufficient research and development (R&D) on vaccines for diseases concentrated in low-income countries, sponsors could commit to purchase viable vaccines if and when they are developed. One or more sponsors would commit to a minimum price that would be paid per...

Aim: To assess the impact of early intervention (EI) services on service costs for people with first-episode psychosis. Methods: A decision model was constructed to map the care pathways following input from EI services and from standard care. A Markov process was used to run the model over 18...

The current study estimated the previous termcontribution of job characteristics to socioeconomic inequalitiesnext term in previous termincidence of myocardial infarctionnext term (MI) during a 12-year follow-up period. Data were from the working population (aged 25–64 years) in the...

Despite increased recognition of the importance of investigating socio-economic inequalities in health from a life course perspective, little is known about the influence of previous termchildhoodnext term socio-economic position (SEP) on previous termcancer incidence.next term The authors...

Improving prescription drug quality is an essential health policy goal in modern health systems, though evidence on the available instruments to attain such a goal are scarce. Cost sharing has an arguable role in improving the likelihood of an individual obtaining an appropriate prescription....

Objective The aim of this study is to examine the factors driving the demand for drugs in Spain, focusing on the existence of disparities in pharmaceutical consumption between the Spanish and the foreign population. Methods Our analysis is based on a multilevel multinomial probit model that...

This paper considers the question of what ought to be valued in the context of measuring the outcomes of healthcare interventions. The answer is discrete health states in the case of the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) model and an entire health profile in the case of the healthy-years...

It has been suggested by a number of economists that decisions about how to allocate scarce health care resources should be informed by the cost per quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) of the different alternatives. One of the criticisms of the QALY approach is that it is based on the...