Objectives: To determine hospital resource utilization, associated costs and the risk of complications during hospitalization for four types of surgical resections and to estimate the incremental burden among patients with cancer compared to those without cancer. Methods: Patients (=18 years...

Background: Risk attitudes influence decisions made under uncertainty. This paper investigates the association of risk attitudes with the utilization of preventive and general healthcare services, work absence and resulting costs to explore their contribution to the heterogeneity in utilization....

We investigate the utilisation of primary and secondary public healthcare services and the consequent public costs, using data from the British Understanding Society household panel. We use a sample of 2,314 adults who, at baseline in 2010/11, reported no history of diagnosed long-lasting health...

Treatment of chronic illness accounts for over 90 % of Medicare spending. Chronic lymphedema places over 3 million Americans at risk of recurrent cellulitis. Health insurers and legislators have taken an active role in fighting attempts to mandate the treatment of lymphedema for fear that...

Background: To evaluate the effects of a case management intervention for frail older people (aged 65+ years) by cost and utility. Materials and methods: One hundred and fifty-three frail older people living at home were randomly assigned to either an intervention (n = 80) or a control group (n...

Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

Rising rates of obesity are a public health concern in every industrialized country. This study investigates the relationship between obesity and health care expenditure in Australia, where the rate of obesity has tripled in the last three decades. Now one in four Australians is considered...

This paper estimates the increase of direct medical costs of both severe and moderate obesity and overweight with respect to a normal-weight individual using a two-part generalised linear model and a longitudinal dataset of medical and administrative records of patients in primary and secondary...

A large literature has examined the healthcare consequences of obesity. A major barrier to careful study of these consequences is reliance on self-reported measures of weight and height. Previous research has developed algorithms to adjust for such error among working age adults. In this study...

Since the differences are obtained while controlling for confounders including neighborhood specific fixed effects at a highly detailed level, the lower costs and longer lives are unlikely to be related to differences in socioeconomic status. Possible explanations include selection (e.g. people...