Health care utilization is expected to rise in the coming decades. Not only will the aggregate need for health care grow by changing demographics, so too will per capita utilization. It has been suggested that trends in health care utilization may be age-specific. In this paper, age-specific...

The Dutch risk equalization scheme has been improved over the years by including health related risk adjusters. The purpose of the Dutch risk equalization scheme is to prevent risk selection and to correct for predictable losses and gains for insurers. The objective of this paper is to explore...

Background: Obesity is a major contributor to the overall burden of disease (also reducing life expectancy) and associated with high medical costs due to obesity-related diseases. However, obesity prevention, while reducing obesity-related morbidity and mortality, may not result in overall...

Which costs and benefits to consider in economic evaluations of healthcare interventions remains an area of much controversy. Unrelated medical costs in life-years gained is an important cost category that is normally ignored in economic evaluations, irrespective of the perspective chosen for...

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In a recent article in this journal Lee argued that indirect medical costs should be ignored in economic evaluations. To reach this conclusion, Lee uses an unrealistic and uncommon budget constraint. This comment highlights a number of methodological problems in Lee's analysis. Moreover, it...

Aging-in-place policies substitute home care for nursing home admissions (NHA). They appear to be a win-win by keeping public spending in check and being in line with personal preferences, but have hitherto not been evaluated. We study the impact of NHA eligibility using Dutch administrative...