Population aging is believed to be a major factor behind the rise of health care cost worldwide. However, an increasing body of evidence in the literature on the subject of population aging and its influence on health care cost suggests that demographic changes play a relatively minor role in...

Based on a survey given to a random sample of Swedish 20-40 year old females, this paper investigates through which channels women receive information about the general risk levels of age-related female infertility and how the different channels affect women’s perceptions of the risk. We find...

Health care has to make transitions to be truly effective in the modern world. A change in paradigm is needed. This requires that value - defined as the health outcome for a particular medical condition per unit of cost expended - must be applied and added to health care, and health care itself...

The aim of this study is to address the challenges of using cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) by decision-makers in rationalizing health care public spending. Firstly, it presents a brief literature review on the necessity of using cost-effectiveness analysis. Also, the paper focuses on ways of...

Background With the exception of key 'proven successes' in global health, the current regime of global health governance can be understood as transnational and national actors pursuing their own interests under a rational actor model of international cooperation, which fails to provide...

Ireland’s health system is at a key turning point. The Irish government was newly elected in February 2011, and the policy directions adopted over the coming months will likely exert a major impact on system performance for many years. Drawing on recent international experience with...

This article considers two unrelated tax provisions – healthcare Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) and the charitable deduction. FSAs permit eligible taxpayers to set income aside tax-free to use for medical expenses. However, these accounts have a “use-it-or-lose-it” feature that...

This study examines the impact of tort reform on minority access to medical care. Past research has investigated tort reform, but this is the first study to consider minority healthcare access. I examine 261 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 1993-2000 to test the impact of non-economic...

Self-selection into healthcare options biases estimates of the effects of healthcare on health outcomes. We exploit exogenous variation in the cost of formal-sector care to show that the use of such care improves short-term health outcomes for acutely ill children in Tanzania. Better...

We propose a joint model to combine models for hospital visits and out-of-pocket medical expenditures. It allows for the presence of non-linear effects of covariates using splines to capture the effects of aging on healthcare demand. Sample heterogeneity is modeled robustly with the random...