The United States has state of the art technology and world renowned expertise in medical treatment, yet in terms of healthcare it shows a dramatically poor performance in relation to the other industrialized countries. This situation is surprising, since one would expect that a free market...

This paper assesses the performance of the United States health system in an international context and discusses potential directions for reform. The US health system is unique among OECD countries in its heavy reliance on the private sector for both financing and delivery of health care. The...

In this paper, I examine the impact of uninsured patients on the health of the insured, focusing on one health outcome - the in-hospital mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I employ panel data models using patient discharge and hospital financial data from California (1999-2006). My...

Public-private partnerships can have a particular impact on sectors where a public service needs to be sustained by the best available professional and technological knowledge in a condition of scarce resources. The growing trend of international-patient mobility suggests, the opportunity to...

This study examines the relationship between pharmaceutical R&D and health care expenditures, distinguishing between the short- and long-run impacts. To measure these relationships quantitatively, we focus on patents as a key factor driving the costs of pharmaceuticals, and develop a structured...

This paper examines the tradeoffs of monitoring for wasteful public spending. By penalizing unnecessary spending, monitoring improves the quality of public expenditure and incentivizes firms to invest in compliance technology. I study a large Medicare program that monitored for unnecessary...

We study the steady upward trend of Health Care Expenditures (HCE) over GDP for a sample of OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. While the US is clearly an outlier, almost all of the additional increase in US HCE happened during the 1978-1990 period. We perform two growth accounting exercises...

Although the crisis of health care in the United States is widely acknowledged – marked by poor health outcomes, high costs, unequal access, and widening health inequities – its structural underpinnings have not been adequately addressed, and reformers have settled on promoting piecemeal...

To examine the extent to which Canadian residents seek medical care across the border, we collected data about Canadians' use of services from ambulatory care facilities and hospitals located in Michigan, New York State, and Washington State during 1994-1998. We also collected information from...

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...