In many developed countries, budgetary pressures have made government investigate private insurance to reduce pressure on their public health system. Between 1997 and 2000 the Australian government implemented a series of reforms intended to increase enrollment in private health insurance and...

BreastScreen Australia provides free mammography services to women in the target age group of 50 to 69 years. The program uses a variety of measures to recruit women to the service and, subsequently, encourage them to screen at two year intervals. One of the stated aims of the program is to...

The Medicare Safety Net Policy was introduced in March 2004 to provide financial relief for those Australians who face high out-of-pocket costs incurred through out-of-hospital medical services. This study examines variation in Safety Net benefits by federal electorate and by type of medical...

In the Australian public health system, access to elective surgery is rationed through provision of health care services, it is generally assumed that a patient?s waiting time and locations. In this paper we undertake Oaxaca-Blinder and DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux decompostition analyses to attribute...

Over 45% of Australians buy health insurance for private treatment in hospital. This is despite having access to universal and free public hospital treatment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one possible explanation for the high rate of insurance coverage is to avoid long waiting times for...

Besley, Hall, and Preston (1999) estimated a model of the demand for private health insurance in Britain as a function of regional waiting lists and found that increases in the number of people waiting for more than 12 months (the long-term waiting list) increased the probability of insurance...

Overweight and obesity continue to contribute to increased risk of chronic diseases, including higher lifetime health expenditures and impacting on individuals? quality of life. Whilst international studies have compared individuals? perceptions of their body mass with more objective measures...

The Australian hospital system is characterised by the co-existence of private hospitals, where individuals pay for services and public hospitals, where services are free to all but delivered after a waiting time. The decision to purchase insurance for private hospital treatment depends on the...

Introduction: Since 1991 State and Federal Governments, under the auspices of BreastScreen Australia, have been providing mammography services free at the point of delivery to women aged 40 and over. One of the stated aims of the program is to provide equitable access to all women in the target...

Both adverse selection and moral hazard models predict a positive relationship between risk and insurance; yet the most common finding in empirical studies of insurance is that of a negative correlation. In this paper we investigate the relationship between ex ante risk and private health...