This paper surveys recent theoretical economic research on long term care (LTC). LTC differs from health care: it is about nursing; it is mostly provided by unpaid caregivers (mainly spouses and children), whereas both the market and the State play a modest role. The future of LTC appears to be...

Should health care provision be public, private, or both? We look at this question in a setting where people differ in their earnings capacity and express an inelastic demand for health care. We assume that illness reduces a person's health status when not receiving immediate treatment.

The focus of this paper is on the trade-off between cost efficiency and access in the choice of the optimal mix of public and private provision in universal health systems. We model a simple health care market in which the regulator acts as a third payer. Patients need one unit of medical...

We explore in this paper the implications of ethical and operational principles for the evaluation of population health. We formalize those principles as axioms for social preferences over distributions of health for a given population. We single out several focal population health evaluation...

Standard models for the evaluation of population health, such as the so-called models of aggregate Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), or aggregate Healthy Years Equivalent (HYEs), are usually criticized on equity grounds. We provide in this paper normative justifications for alternative...

This paper studies the design of the optimal non linear taxation in an economy where longevity varies across agents, and depends on three factors: longevity genes, health investment and farsightedness. Provided earnings, farsightedness and genes are correlated, governmental intervention can be...

Inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors. Measuring "unfair"inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading toethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimateinequalities. An example of...

The built environment plays a key role in the strategy of “Aging in Place”. Here, we study the influence of the built environment on the health status of elderly people living in Brussels. Using census and geocoded data, we analysed if built environment factors were associated with poor...

We analyze the determinants of the demand for social, private and self-insurance for long-term care in an environment where agents differ in income, probability of becoming dependent and of receiving family help. Uniform social benefits are financed with a proportional income tax and are thus...

Hospital financing systems determine ma jor decisions made by physicians and managers within hospitals. This paper examines the impact of the transition toward an activity-based reimburse- ment system that has emerged in most OCDE countries. We consider two initial situations, one for a private...