The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the evolution of health care expenditure in Spain during the period 1980-1997, and henceforth to comment on the cost containment measures put forward to control its growth. The paper is divided into three separate sections. The first offers...

Quality of care is qualified as a main determinant of the demand for voluntary private health insurance (PHI) in National Health Systems (NHS). This paper provides new evidence on the influence of the quality gap between public and private health insurance and other demand determinants in the...

This paper shows how recently developed regression-based methods for the decomposition of health inequality can be extended to incorporate individual heterogeneity in the responses of health to the explanatory variables. We illustrate our method with an application to the Canadian NPHS of 1994....

This paper studies two important reasons why people violate procedure invariance, loss aversion and scale compatibility. The paper extends previous research on loss aversion and scale compatibility by studying loss aversion and scale compatibility simultaneously, by looking at a new decision...

This article deals with the taxation of private car fuels in Spain, analyzing its theoretical foundations and carrying out a comparative study of tax design and tax levels. Moreover, we estimate a demand system of car fuels with data from Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares, which...

Expected utility theory (EUT) has been challenged as a descriptive theory in many contexts. The medical decision analysis context is not an exception. Several researchers have suggested that rank dependent utility theory (RDUT) may accurately describe how people evaluate alternative medical...

This paper reviews what has increased medical-care spending bought in terms of health benefits with longitudinal data from the U.S and, more limited, from Spain. Health services contribution to health has been positive in average, especially during the last 50 years for the U.S and the last 30...

This paper analyses whether or not tax subsidies to private medical insurance are self-financing by means of a structural approach. We construct a simulation routine based on a microeconometric discrete choice model that allows us to evaluate the impact of premium changes on the utilisation of...

Broadly speaking, pharmaceutical policy in Spain has been unable to control either the price or the volume of drugs prescribed. Limited attempts have been made to bring together the regulation of the pharmaceutical market and policies, in pursuit of the desired goals of efficiency and quality....

The goal of this paper is to present an optimal resource allocation model for the regional allocation of public service inputs. The proposed solution leads to maximise the relative public service availability in regions located below the best availability frontier, subject to exogenous budget...