Social health care systems around the world are inevitably confronted with the scarcity of resources and the resulting distributional challenges. Prioritization is applied in almost all countries, implicitly or explicitly, and shapes access to health services. We analyze and compare attitudes...

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...

We develop a general framework for optimal health policy design in a dynamic setting. We consider a hypothetical medical intervention for a cohort of patients where one parameter varies across cohorts with imperfectly observable linear dynamics. We seek to identify the optimal time to change the...

This paper examines the impact of changes in public long-term care spending on the use of public hospitals among the older population in England, and the cost and quality of this care. Mean per-person long-term care spending fell by 31% between 2009/10 and 2017/18 as part of a large austerity...

Health spending per capita in England has more than doubled since 1997, yet relatively little is known about how that spending is distributed across the population. This paper uses administrative National Health Service (NHS) hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending...

Politicians will go to any lengths to persuade the voting public that the National Health Service is safe in their hands. Alternative policy models cannot be placed before the electorate unless political parties take huge risks. Yet, at the same time, we see even a Labour government drawing...

A project aimed at presenting initial results from the implementation of the System of Health Accounts has been carried out by the Health Policy Unit at the OECD and experts from thirteen member countries. The results are presented in the form of a comparative study (OECD Health Working Papers...

Over the year’s countries have experienced a rapid rise in ageing population. With increase in elderly population there has been a significant financial impact forced onto government healthcare institutions. Studies in the past have already stressed on this issue providing alternative...

Health services are largely tax-financed in the United Kingdom and account for 14 per cent of general government spending. This paper analyses how the National Health Service (NHS) has been dealing with the associated expenditure pressures in the pre-1990 set-up and during the “quasi-market”...

The World Health Organization and Public Health England have been widely criticised for their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper looks at what went wrong. The WHO has been accused of being credulous in its dealings with China and giving the world a false sense of security about the...