The Australian hospital system is characterised by the co-existence of private hospitals, where individuals pay for services and public hospitals, where services are free to all but delivered after a waiting time. The decision to purchase insurance for private hospital treatment depends on the...

Besley, Hall, and Preston (1999) estimated a model of the demand for private health insurance in Britain as a function of regional waiting lists and found that increases in the number of people waiting for more than 12 months (the long-term waiting list) increased the probability of insurance...

The topic of this paper is whether it is possible, given the current state of knowledge and technology, to design the appropriate market structure for managed competition. The next section reviews market failure in the private health insurance market. The subsequent two sections describe the...

This paper analyses the policy implications for health insurance markets of the development of genetic testing. A central issue surrounding this development is whether insurers should be allowed access to the information provided by such tests. The paper first shows that on efficiency grounds...

The Australian Health Reform Agreement has provided the basis for major change in the delivery of health care services. While the components of reform have undergone extensivenegotiation between Commonwealth and State governments, and have been subject to academic and other commentary, little is...

This brief methods paper explains how to use the NSW Government Health Costs of Care Standards to estimate the cost of presentations to emergency departments (ED) in NSW. We begin with a discussion of the allocation of presentations according to visit type, triage category and mode of separation...

An Early Discharge Program (EDP) for medically uncomplicated obstetrics patients operates from three hospitals in Sydney's western suburbs, Westmead Hospital, a large teaching hospital, and Auburn and Blacktown, which are smaller district hospitals. The patients are discharged home between 6 and...

A cost effectiveness analysis of differing school based TB infection screening regimes was conducted for 1996 populations of Year 1 and Year 8 students who attended schools in the areas of Central Sydney Area Health Service and South Western Sydney Area Health Service. The costs of screening...

In June 1990 the Australian Health Ministers endorsed a policy, known as the Nationally Funded Centres (NFC) programme, aimed at providing new and developing technologies in a coordinated and planned way on a national basis. The principal objective was to ensure that such technologies were...

This analysis compared the costs and benefits of tamoxifen for women with early breast cancer. The main question addressed was: what are the costs and benefits of the use of tamoxifen as an adjuvant treatment in terms of survival and disease free survival for women? Survival and disease free...