Within a horizontally differentiation model, we analyse the relative effects of reference pricing and copayment reimbursement on firms pricing and quality strategies as well as on market coverage under different market structures: competitive market, local monopolies and exogenous full market...

Ethical issues must take first place in the evaluation of a prenatal screening programme. The economic issues are less weighty but will be important in the decision as to whether a particular programme is introduced. This paper presents a critique of the published economic studies of screening...

This Discussion Paper is concerned with the development of risk-sharing systems for health, in low- and middle-income countries. It questions whether insurance theory developed in wealthier economies, in particular the central ideas of adverse selection and moral hazard, has relevance in the...

Recently the English NHS has introduced an activity-based payment scheme for secondary care - the Payment by Results (PbR) policy. In this paper we discuss, from an economic perspective, the main intended and unintended incentives created by this policy. We also outline the role of different NHS...

The Russian pharmaceutical sector is currently undergoing reform of the procurement, distribution and financing of medical drugs. The political imperatives underpinning these changes are wide ranging, and include the desire to protect local industry while benefiting from higher quality or less...

The need to develop methods of measuring nursing workload is not new, but the search for accurate measures to calculate the demand for nursing has assumed greater significance in recent years owing to the advent of resource management and the necessity to manage efficiently the most costly...

This discussion paper presents data from the Department of Health funded Measurement and Valuation of Health survey conducted at the Centre for Health Economics in 1993. This was a nationally representative interview survey of 3395 men and women aged 18 or over living in the UK. Amongst other...

In 1992, the Measurement and Valuation of Health (MVH) Group at the Centre for Health Economics conducted a study with Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) comparing different methods of valuing health states (Dolan et al, 1993). A random sample of 335 members of the general population...

The allocation of funding and the distribution of the workforce in primary care is very unequal in England. Whilst hospital resources have been allocated in relation to a weighted capitation formula in each of the component parts of the United Kingdom since the late 1970s, there have been...

Although fairly detailed information on NHS inputs can be identified, little or no corresponding data on outcomes are available to those concerned with the management and delivery of health care. The absence of any significant outcome data is a longstanding problem which has so far been largely...