In 2011, Japan celebrated the 50th anniversary of its own achievement of universal health coverage (UHC). On this occasion, the government of Japan and the World Bank conceived the idea of undertaking a multi-country study to respond to this growing demand by sharing rich and varied country...

The goals of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) are to ensure that all people can access quality health services, to safeguard all people from public health risks, and to protect all people from impoverishment due to illness, whether from out-of-pocket payments for health care or loss of income...

In health policy, magic bullet answers tend to have more appeal than incremental adjustments. Politicians faced with the daunting issues in healthcare are eager to embrace new ideas promoted by academics and think tanks. However, in implementation, intrinsic flaws in design, such as the...

In most modern developed communities, women are known to live longer than men. A less known fact is that in many statistics reporting differences in life expectancy between socio-economic classes, on average women in the worst-off social class live as long as men in the best-off social class, if...

We consider a proposal for pharmaceutical patenting policy: namely, for society to grant and purchase the patent of the first of a new class of drug, instead of purchasing the drug, and award no further patents to runner-up drugs, producing or licensing production with price set to maximise...

In this paper, we outline the three main concepts of 'ageism'; health maximisation ageism, productivity ageism, and fair innings ageism. We provide a methodological overview of the existing empirical literature on people's preferences regarding age and classify these studies according to the...

This paper deals with the relevance of age in the paradigm of quality adjusted life years (QALYs). The first section outlines two rationales for incorporating age weights into QALYs. One of them is based on efficiency concerns; and the other on equity concerns. Both of these are theoretical...

Abásolo and Tsuchiya (2004a) report on an empirical study to elicit public preferences regarding the efficiency-equality trade-off in health, where the majority of respondents violated monotonicity. The procedure used has been subject to criticisms regarding potential biases in the results. The...

This paper considers two societal concerns in addition to health maximisation: first, concerns for the societal value of lifetime health for an individual; and second, concerns for the value of lifetime health across individuals. Health-related social welfare functions (HRSWFs) have addressed...