Drug prices have been a conspicuous political issue in much of recent history, but no more so than during health care reform debates in 1993 and 1994. This paper investigates possible effects of political activity on pharmaceutical prices, with a particular focus on the health care reform...

The introduction of antibiotics as a medical treatment after World War II helped to dramatically increase life expectancy in the industrialized world. As a consequence of over-prescription the last decades ave however seen a sharp increase in prevalence of multi-resistant bacteria, disarming...

Fiercely contested before, during, and after its passage, the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is beginning to restructure the U.S. healthcare market. This article describes the history of healthcare reform initiatives in the United States, analyzes the policy context in...

The Czech health care system is doing well in terms of health outcomes compared to other Central East European economies that inherited similar health systems after the transition and has been converging to OECD averages. However, benchmarking the Czech health system to countries with comparable...

Trade in health products has been flourishing in recent years as the demand for better health has been growing throughout the world. At the same time, trade in health products is hampered by substantive trade barriers. In this paper, we present evidence that countries around the world still...

Recent outbreaks of infectious pathogens such as Zika, Ebola, and COVID-19 have underscored the need for the dependable availability of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). The cost and risk of R&D programs and uniquely unpredictable demand for EID vaccines have discouraged...

The portfolio approach of financing drug development has been proposed as a financial innovation to improve the risk/return tradeoff of investment in drug development projects through the use of diversification and securitization. By investing in a sizable and well-diversified portfolio of novel...

This paper analyzes the consequences of parallel trade on health care systems in a two-country model with a vertical distributor relationship. In particular, two cost-sharing systems coinsurance and indemnity insurance are compared with respect to changes in copayments and public health...

This paper studies the propensities of the U.S. population to seek a full dose of vaccinations against the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the consideration of vaccine dissemination at the disaggregated or the local level, the main focus of this study is on determining whether a lack of health...