One is always hesitant to speak about the future. A famous philosopher from New York, Yogi Berra, said "Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future," and I have some trepidation about doing so now. There is also the difficulty of understanding what really has happened in the...

Our system of universal public insurance for health care is by a considerable margin Canada's must successful and popular public program. We think of it, not just as an administrative mechanism for paying medical bills, but as an important symbol of community, a concrete representation of mutual...

The discussion about health care systems focuses on the dynamics of expenditures and on the weak growth of revenues. In this discussion it is widely overseen that medical expenditures and the supply of medical services depend crucially on the compensation of physician services. The paper...

This study analyzes whether medical services are productive for the improvement of health. The assessment of the effect of medical services on improved health is empirically difficult: individuals with failing health obtain medical services. The proposed empirical model accounts for the...

Treatment is highly cost-effective in reducing an individual's substance abuse (SA) and associated harms. However, data from Treatment Episodes (TEDS) indicate that per capita treatment admissions substantially lagged behind increases in heavy drug use from 1992-2007. Only ten percent of...

Alzheimer's disease represents a significant burden in terms of time for the carer of the patient not institutionalized. The aim of this article is to estimate the cost of the time of the informal care depending on the type of disability and study the underlying factors of its variability. The...

The rise in the number of old and very old persons, contingent on demographic factors, and the substantial reduction in the number of people of working age present a major challenge to the care industry. Although many of those needing care today are looked after by family members at home, they...

This paper examines the causal effect of the experience of a hospital with treating hip fractures (volume) on treatment outcome for patients. A full sample of administrative data from Germany for the year 2007 is used. We apply an instrumental variable approach to eliminate endogeneity concerns...

Using a panel dataset on 45 sub-Saharan Africa countries (SSA), this study analyzes empirically the socioeconomic determinants of life expectancy gain (considered as an indicator of global health improvement at country level). In order to treat heterogeneity and endogeneity concerns, we use...