This paper compares health care systems. It looks beyond normal academic, political, or journalistic rhetoric, by exactly sticking to facts, i.e. empirical data (in particular data provided by the WHO) and comprehensive case study analyses. The paper finds that a number of myths and common...

I review the key issues that arise in financing health care delivery. I begin by documenting the key features of health care markets that make financing so central in this sector, such as the skewed and unpredictable nature of health care spending and market failures in health care delivery. I...

This paper investigates the impact of policies and institutions on health expenditures for a large panel of OECD countries for the period 2000-10. We use a set of 20 policy and institutional indicators developed by the OECD characterising the main supply-side, demand-side, and public management,...

This paper investigates the impact of policies and institutions on health expenditures for a large panel of OECD countries for the period 2000-10. We use a set of 20 policy and institutional indicators developed by the OECD characterising the main supply-side, demand-side, and public management,...

We use a sample of OECD countries in order to better understand why the US health care expenditure as a percentage of its Gross Domestic Product ("health care effort") is so far above any other. To this end we employ a descriptive cross-country methodology based partially on econometric...

Across the OECD, healthcare spending has typically outpaced economic growth in recent decades. While such spending has improved health outcomes, there are concerns about the financial sustainability of this upward trend, particularly as healthcare systems are predominantly funded from public...

Health services account for a large and increasing share of production and expenditure in OECD and Eurostat countries but there are also noticeable differences between countries in expenditure per capita. Whether such differences are due to more services being consumed or whether they reflect...

Rationale: Health care expenditures in industrial countries have been growing rapidly over the past forty years. This rapid growth jeopardizes the sustainability of public budgets. A particular concern for the next decades is the effect of aging of the population on health care expenditures....