The paper provides an analysis of the determinants of health spending differentials among the Italian Regions for the years 1998-2010. An original standardised spending framework is proposed that takes into account the appropriateness of the services provided and price/technical efficiency, as...

In this study, we document the effect of Food Stamp access on adult health care utilization. While Food Stamps is one of the largest safety net programs in the U.S. today, the universal nature of the program across geographic areas and over time limits the potential for quasi-experimental...

Recent political events have thrust the bulk negotiation of drug prices by Medicare and Medicaid back into the spotlight. Yet, even if politically feasible, there is no clear framework for negotiating prices of new drugs with uncertain target populations — for example, due to imprecise...

Governments and firms often use committees of experts to help them make complexdecisions, but conflicts of interest could bias experts' recommendations. We focus on whetherfinancial ties to drug companies bias FDA drug advisory committee (AC) members' voting ondrug approval recommendations. We...

To test for ethnic discrimination in access to outpatient health care services, we carry out an email-correspondence study in Germany. We approach 3,224 physician offices in the 79 largest cities in Germany with fictitious appointment requests and randomized patients' characteristics. We find...

This paper examines the question of whether wealthy middle-class families are sheltering large sums of money in abusive financial arrangements in order to qualify for Medicaid benefits for nursing home patients, possibly endangering the fiscal integrity of the program. This paper argues that the...

Background: In health economic evaluation, utility associated with a health state is outcome-oriented and usually measured using the QALY methodology. Even though there is consistent evidence of utility not only being derived from outcomes but also from procedures, process utility has not been...

I apply a Bayesian persuasion framework to study information transmission in the physician-patient relationship. I highlight each party’s financial incentives in this transmission and the subsequent determination of medical treatment outcomes. I estimate the model using a large database of...

Despite some relative improvements in the last fifteen years, the National Health Service remains an international laggard in terms of those health outcomes that can be attributed to the healthcare system. In international comparisons of health system performance, the NHS almost always ranks in...

Medical and nursing care have been separated from social care by deliberate design since the creation of the NHS. This divide is now entirely artificial. People spend less time in hospital than used to be the case and 4 million people over the age of 65 have a life-limiting illness. In such...