Two important unresolved issues in the evaluation of health care programs are the treatment of indirect costs and the selection of the appropriate discount rate. This paper emphasizes the role of distortionary taxation in addressing these issues. It establishes that: (i) indirect government-paid...

Medicare reform is the elephant in the room, according to Andrew J. Rettenmaier and Thomas R. Saving, who propose a solution.

This article revisits the long-standing issue of the determinants of health outcomes. We make two contributions to the literature. First, we use a large and comprehensive US county level health data set that has only recently become available. This data set includes five measures of health...

We use a simple lifetime utility maximization model to study the problem of medical resource allocation. This model leads to a welfare specification with a QALY (quality-adjusted life-year) component that captures an individual's preferences over both life expectancy and health status. The goal...

Objectives Due to major problems of accessing essential medicines, this paper will evaluate the impact of the new Shenzhen labor health insurance on accessing essential medicines among migrant workers.Methods Medicines data and revenues-expenditures reports from 19 community health service...

This paper provides two theorems which characterize the domains of valuation functions for which there exist Pareto efficient and truth dominant strategy mechanisms (balanced Groves mechanisms). Theorem 1 characterizes the existence of balanced Groves mechanisms for a general class of valuation...

The excess burden of taxation typically has two graphical representations in undergraduate microeconomics and public finance textbooks: the IC/BC (indifference curve/budget constraint) representation and the demand/supply representation. The IC/BC representation has the advantage of showing the...

Previous studies demonstrated that the willingness to pay (WTP) for reducing the risk of a targeted disease increases with the severity of a comorbidity condition. They evaluated the WTPs at positions where otherwise identical individuals who have unequal comorbidity conditions all have the same...