In Scandinavia, the provision of health care services has been, almost entirely, the responsibility of the public health care system. However, in the last five to seven years there has been remarkable growth in the private health care market. These health care services are obtained normally...

This paper presents a set of indicators to assess health care system performance. It also presents new comparative data on health care policies and institutions for OECD countries. This set of indicators allows the empirical characterisation of health care systems and the identification of...

There are no ready-made data on hospital outputs and inputs which would allow comprehensive international comparisons of hospital efficiency to be carried out. This paper, therefore, relies on selected evidence to compare hospital efficiency in a subset of OECD countries, based on three...

After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country’s GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times...

The highly regarded Austrian health system delivers good quality and easily accessible services, but is costly. Its governance and funding structure is highly fragmented and it makes too much use of inpatient care in hospitals. Entry and competition opportunities are de facto limited in most...

Once a humble, beloved, charity-based arm of the healthcare industry, hospice is now a multi-billion dollar industry, funded almost exclusively by Medicare, run by for-profit corporations answering to private equity investors and Wall Street, and more and more frequently plagued by fraud and...

This toolkit contains the elements needed to understand the problem of medical malpractice in America today, and whether alternative dispute resolution (i.e., arbitration) clauses might be viable among other tort reform options. The toolkit introduces medical liability as an intrinsic component...

Objective. To assess relationships between changes in Medicare Advantage (MA) payment rates and Medicare beneficiary hospitalizations and to simulate the effects of scheduled payment cuts on ambulatory care sensitive and elective hospitalization rates. Data. State Inpatient Database discharge...

The Royal Decree 1015/2009, June 19th 2009 (RDDMSE) aims to facilitate the access to drugs – the drug in question should be subject to a marketing authorisation application or must be undergoing clinical trials – before approval, in Spain, in patients with a chronical or severely...

Advocates of a new federal comparative-effectiveness agency argue that such information has characteristics of a public good, therefore markets will not generate the efficiency-maximizing quantity. However, economic theory does not conclude that government should provide...