With the election of President Donald Trump, no domestic policy is a bigger target for change than the Affordable Care Act (ACA), former President Obama's signature health insurance law. His very first executive order, signed within hours of being inaugurated, was aimed at rolling back parts of...

Prolonged hospital stays, or hospital stays that are longer than medically necessary, are a major concern for patients, payers, and providers. We conceptualize and empirically estimate the prevalence and cost of prolonged stays among elderly hospital patients (65 years and older) in Brazil and...

Throughout the Truman administration's Fair Deal era, ideas for a national system of publicly financed universal health care were developed, debated, and even proposed in Congress. In spite of public support for health care reform, each legislative proposal that embodied these ideas failed, and...

Not a single COVID-19 crisis standard of care allocation plan suggests that life-saving critical care resources should go first to those able to pay or to the oldest in need. Yet, every day we ration healthcare in the United States, and with limited exceptions, care is rationed based on ability...

Despite some relative improvements in the last fifteen years, the National Health Service remains an international laggard in terms of those health outcomes that can be attributed to the healthcare system. In international comparisons of health system performance, the NHS almost always ranks in...

Medical and nursing care have been separated from social care by deliberate design since the creation of the NHS. This divide is now entirely artificial. People spend less time in hospital than used to be the case and 4 million people over the age of 65 have a life-limiting illness. In such...

Health systems in Western countries are plagued by inefficiency and will likely require a substantial increase in the tax burden as populations age. Patients might also face a gradual decrease in the quality and scope of services. The organisational changes needed to drive costs down and...

The idea of a public health insurance option is at least a half century old, but has not yet had its day in the limelight. This chapter explains why if that moment ever comes, health care’s public option will fall short of expectations that it will provide a differentiated, meaningful...

This paper evaluates the contraceptive mandate as a public health initiative. It applies two fairly standard analytical frameworks used to scrutinize public health ethics, policy, and law issues. The first is a framework for analyzing public health ethics and deliberating about public health...

In the first two quarters of 2013 the Georgian government introduced and fully implemented a universal health care (UHC) plan covering all those not-yet publicly or privately insured. We estimate the effect of the introduction of the universal healthcare plan on the level of out-of-pocket (OOP)...