In March 2009, Business and Economic Research Limited ("BERL") published “Costs of Harmful Alcohol and Other Drug Use,” a report jointly commissioned by the Ministry of Health and ACC. BERL was asked to measure the costs of drug and alcohol abuse to New Zealand society, but not to evaluate...

We review methods and assess the policy influence of a series of publiclyfunded Cost of Illness studies, mostly published since 1990. Our analysis shows that headline cost estimates, including the influential paper by Collins and Lapsley (2008), depend on an incorrect procedure for incorporating...

This paper contributes to evidence regarding the effectiveness of the Medicaid expansions by focusing on a key beneficiary - the mother - who has previously been overlooked. Using the Natality Detail Files for 1989-96, we estimate the relationship between Medicaid eligibility and maternal health...

Are recessions good for pregnancy? In this paper, I investigate the relationship between unemployment fluctuations, prenatal care utilization, and infant and maternal health. Analyzing the US Natality Detail Files data for the period 1989-99 aggregated by county, year, and race, I find the...

We propose a mechanism to implement the distributional goal of "specific egalitarianism", or that allocation of a good be independent of income, but increasing in relative strength of preference or need. Governments could offer the good at multiple "outlets" that charge different money and time...

We propose an allocation mechanism for publicly providing a private good such that the final allocation is simultaneously independent of income and increasing in strength of preference or need. The "pay or wait" mechanism consists of offering the good for sale at two outlets. The 'queuing'...

The right to equal treatment, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status and place of resident, is an important principle for several health care systems. A reform of the Norwegian hospital sector may be used as a relevant experiment for investigating whether centralization of...

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions and access to primary health care on health outcomes in Norway. Total mortality rates, grouped into four causes of death, were used as proxies for health, and the number of general practitioners (GPs) at the municipality level was used as the...

Objective: Targeting hospital treatment at patients with high priority would seem to be a natural policy response to the growing gap between what can be done and what can be financed in the specialist health care sector. The paper examines the distributionalconsequences of this policy. Method:...

We analyze and compare inequity in use of physician visits (GP and specialists) in Norway based on data from the Surveys of Living Conditions for the years 2000, 2002 and 2005. Within this period the Norwegian public health care system underwent two major reforms, both aimed at ensuring...