The level and distribution of patient waiting times for elective treatments is a major concern in publicly-funded health care systems. Strict targets, which have specified maximum waiting times, have been introduced in the NHS over the last decade and have been criticized for distorting existing...

This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of inequality and inequity in the delivery of health care based on recent contributions to the literature of poverty and deprivation. This approach has some appealing characteristics that enlarge the scope of inequity analysis: 1) the measure...

Using individual patient level hospital utilisation data for 2003, we examine the decisions of Dutch patients to bypass the nearest hospital for orthopaedics and neurosurgery. During our sample period, health insurers did not steer patients to preferred hospitals and performance indicators were...

While a growing literature examining the relationship between income and health expenditures suggests that health care is a luxury good, this conclusion is contentiously debated due to heterogeneity of the existing results. This paper tests the luxury good hypothesis (namely that income...

This paper proposes a new approach to the measurement of inequality and inequity in the delivery of health care based on contributions from the literature on poverty and deprivation. This approach has some appealing characteristics: 1) inequity is additively decomposable by population subgroups;...