The adoption of new health technologies brings potential improvements to quality of life as well as new costs for provincial healthcare systems. An appropriate evidence-based framework for adoption decisions therefore can go a long way to improving value for money in our health systems. While...

Canadian specialist doctors are paid mainly through fee-for-service for the procedures they perform. Nationwide, more than 80 percent of surgical specialists’ income comes from fee-for-service payments that are negotiated collectively with provincial health ministries. Surgical specialists...

Rationale: International priority setting in the fight against global epidemics calls for new approaches to quantify the effects of diseases on entire economies and groups of countries. Objective: We aim to estimate the full social costs of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Europe, using the...

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...

In keeping with the Symposium theme, quot;The Mass Media's Influence on Health Law and Policy,quot; this essay is designed to share my experience using clips from three recent popular films as a method of enhancing coverage and discussion of legal and policy issues surrounding the private health...

Western societies can reduce avoidable mortality and morbidity by better understanding the relationship between obesity and chronic disease. This paper examines the empirical association between obesity and the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and elevated cholesterol. We...

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...

We analyze smoking risk beliefs and smoking behavior using individual data from 1997 for the United States and 1998 for Massachusetts. Smokers and adults more generally overestimate the lung cancer risks of smoking and the mortality risks and life expectancy loss. Higher risk beliefs decrease...

The hypothesis of the reciprocal determination of obesity and depression (OD) epidemics, contrasts with the anecdotal wisdom of a person being 'jolly and fat', and calls for a better understanding of any underpinning socio-environmental determinants. This paper deals with the influence of...

A szerző az Országos Egészségbiztosítási Pénztár megbízásából végzett, az egészségügyre fordított kiadások tendenciáinak bemutatására irányuló felmérés eredményeit ismerteti cikkében. A családok romló anyagi helyzete miatt a háztartások többségének már nincs...