Private and public third-party payers - particularly Medicare - are experimenting with financial incentives that reward health care providers for delivering recommended medical care. While quot;pay for performancequot; (P4P) has the potential to improve quality in some instances, it can also...

Patients in the United States are routinely undertreated for pain. This problem has been widely recognized and documented in medical literature. In a seminal medical study of end-of-life care, researchers found that 50% of all patients who died during hospitalization quot;experienced moderate or...

El análisis costo utilidad es un tipo de análisis de costo efectividad que estima el costo por año de vida ajustado por calidad – AVAC o QALY (en inglés). A partir del desarrollo histórico de los QALY, se presenta su fundamento en las medidas de calidad de vida y en la teoría de utilidad...

ABSTRACT The high price of cancer drugs has become a world-wide phenomenon. In recent decades, studies have produced ample evidence of rising research and clinical testing costs underlying pharmaceutical innovations. There is a general concurrence that the current model of drug development needs...

In the past, the individual using medical care was generally referred to as the "patient", with this word's connotations of an individual who was passive, forbearing and accepting. The emerging view is to look at the individual using medical care as a consumer, with this word's very different...

Increased concentration in the hospital industry has been a focus of recent antitrust review of the current wave of hospital mergers. As argued by Demsetz, the potential danger that increased concentration imposes on economic efficiency in any industry turns upon whether the change in...

Increasing costs of most healthcare systems result in (major) financing problems and thus are the focus of many empirical inquiries. Researchers have found that mismanagement is often a consequence of misplaced incentives. This paper tries to outline some cases in which the demand side of...

In this paper, we study the long-term determinants of insurance coverage among the elderly using a new data source, the 1990 Health Spplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

The appropriate role of the state in health is complex both in economic theory and in practice. Theory identifies three reasons for state action: public goods or services with large externalities (involving efficiency); poverty (involving equity); and failings peculiar to insurance markets for...

El objetivo de esta investigación es determinar la situación actual de la oferta de servicios de salud en el país, identificando diferencias entre regiones, regímenes y naturaleza jurídica de los prestadores. A partir del análisis de distintas fuentes de información se encontró que de...