The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act intensified debates over the role of government in the distribution of healthcare. A nationally-representative sample of Americans reported their estimated and ideal distributions of healthcare (unmet need for prescription medications) and...

We compare health care inequity in Japan with that in other OECD countries in 2002 and 2003. To overcome Japanese data problems, we conducted an original survey. Although some problems remain, we obtained internationally comparable results on health care inequity for Japan. We test the...

In countries where health care is publicly provided and where equity considerations play an important role in policy decisions, it is often argued that an increase in co-payments is unacceptable as it will be particularly harmful to the less well-off in society. The present paper derives...

We illustrate how the desire to live in a fair society that rewards individual effort and hard work triggers an unselfish though rational demand for redistribution. This leads the well off to prefer higher taxes and the poor to reject extreme progressivity. We then provide evidence of these...

In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter ε of this function expresses a society’s aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the...