For 2 years the Greek financial crisis has captured global attention. In return for loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European institutions, Greece agreed on harsh across-the-board austerity measures, yet most commentators offer little hope for recovery, at least in the short...

The Republic of Cyprus is the only country in the European Union (EU) whose health system is comprised of public and private sectors of relatively similar sizes. The division within the health system, combined with a lack of efficient payment mechanisms and monitoring systems, contributes to...

The LSE Companion to Health Policy covers a wide range of conceptual and practical issues from a number of different perspectives introducing the reader to, and summarising, the vast literature that analyses the complexities of health policy. The Companion also assesses the current state of the art.

Valuing health outcomes is a fundamental concern in health economics. This article considers a measure of health outcomes: the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). The QALY has been used extensively for two main reasons: (1) it arguably values health outcomes in a more acceptable metric than money...

The last decade has shown a concerted effort in the UK to find ways of reducing coronary heart disease (CHD), culminating in the recent government target of a 30% reduction in the rates in people under the age of 65 years to be achieved between 1988 and 2000 by modification of the main risk...

A number of non-parametric estimators have been proposed to calculate average medical care costs in the presence of censoring. This paper assesses their performance both in terms of bias and efficiency under extreme conditions using a medical dataset which exhibits heavy censoring. The...

Pharmacoeconomic analyses have become useful and essential tools for health care decision makers who increasingly require such analyses prior to placing a drug on a national, regional or hospital formulary. Previous health economic models of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have...

Hospitals can be reimbursed for their costs in many ways. Several authors have investigated the effects of these reimbursement rules on physician incentives and, therefore, on the quantity of services provided to patients. A form of (linear) cost-sharing tends to emerge as the socially efficient...