Despite improvements over the past few decades, Slovak health outcomes remains poor compared with most other OECD countries, even after controlling for differences in per capita income and other social, cultural and lifestyle factors. Disparities in access to care and health outcomes between the...

France’s health-care system offers high-quality care. Average health outcomes are good, public satisfaction with the health-care system is high, and average household out-of-pocket expenditures are low. As in other OECD countries, technology is expanding possibilities for life extension and...

The Czech health care system is doing well in terms of health outcomes compared to other Central East European economies that inherited similar health systems after the transition and has been converging to OECD averages. However, benchmarking the Czech health system to countries with comparable...

Medicare has increased the use of performance pay incentives for hospitals, with the goal of increasing care coordination across providers, reducing market frictions, and ultimately to improve quality of care. This paper provides new empirical evidence by using novel operations and claims data...

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...

An ambitious reform to increase efficiency of the Portuguese health care system was launched in 2002. In contrast to previous attempts of gradual reforms, which were never fully implemented, the strategy has been to create a big bang in the health sector, making changes essentially irreversible....

This study presents a broad overview of health-system reforms in OECD countries over the past several decades. Reforms are assessed according to their impact on the following policy goals: ensuring access to needed health-care services; improving the quality of health care and its outcomes;...

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...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

The national hepatitis C elimination initiative provides an opportunity to dramatically expand access to hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment and put the US on a path to eliminating hepatitis C. Our objective was to project the health benefits and cost savings of this initiative. A previously...