Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) cause about 71% of all deaths globally and a considerable increase in health care costs. To tackle this problem, several Governments have designed "sin taxes", i.e, extra payments related to the quantity of unhealthy contents of specific goods. However, unhealthy...

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...

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to...

We use longitudinal, disease-level data to analyze the impact of pharmaceutical innovation on longevity and medical expenditure in Sweden, where mean age at death increased by 1.88 years during the period 1997-2010. Pharmaceutical innovation is estimated to have increased mean age at death by...

The nation's spending for prescription drugs has grown dramatically in recent years. Previous studies have shown that the replacement of older drugs by newer, more expensive, drugs is the single most important reason for this increase, but they did not measure how much of the difference between...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% G from 69.7 to 76.5 years G and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. While life expectancy has tended to increase, there...

We examine the strategic interaction in the market for physician services when the total budget for reimbursement is fixed. We show that this prospective payment system involves { compared to a fee-for-service remuneration system { a severe coordination problem, which potentially leads to the...

This study examines the relationship between healthcare expenditure and disposable income in the 50 US states over the period 1966-2009 using fractional integration and cointegration techniques. The degree of integration and non-linearity of both series are found to vary considerably across...