The size of national health care expenditure is an important research and policy issue. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical analyses of an implied optimal size for a health sector. Various economic theories are explicitly or implicitly invoked, but none is fully satisfactory. Theory...

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...

A simulation model was constructed to assess the relative costs and cost-effectiveness of different screening and vaccination strategies for dealing with hospital incidents of varicella exposure, compared with current policies, using data from published sources and a hospital survey. The mean...

BACKGROUND: Family planning services are amongst the most highly utilized services in the National Health Service. There have, however, been few empirical studies of the costeffectiveness of these services. METHODS: Two measures of output were used to calculate the cost-effectiveness of family...

The objective of this study was to evaluate economically a screening programme within the Oxford Regional Health Authority for Down's syndrome, based on maternal serum {alpha} fetoprotein, unconjugated oestriol and human chorionic gonadotrophin as well as maternal age (the triple test) against...

Recent epidemiological studies suggest that much urological disease is untreated. However, the overall economic burden of urological diseases has never been systematically studied. This report estimates the economic burden of treated benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) in the United Kingdom by...

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of their market-based reforms to the English National Health Service. From January...

This paper investigates how regulation impinges on the launch strategies of international pharmaceutical corporations for new molecules and generics across the main OECD markets during 1960-2008. Comprehensive IMS data is used to analyze the international diffusion of 845 molecules from 14...