Aims: To review the current state of hospital bed planning, and to develop a simple tool to estimate short-term future bed requirements using historical bed occupancy data. Study Design: Analysis of daily bed occupancy between January 2008 and October 2015. Synthesis of trends into a method for...

Several studies of health system responsiveness focus on the demand-side by investigating the association between socio-demographic characteristics of patients and their reported level of responsiveness. However, little is known about the influence of supply-side factors. This paper addresses...

Estimation procedures for ordered categories usually assume that the estimated coefficients of independent variables do not vary between the categories (parallel-lines assumption). This view neglects possible heterogeneous effects of some explaining factors. This paper describes the use of an...

Medicare Part D provides prescription drug coverage through Medicare approved plans offered by private insurance companies and HMOs. In this paper, we study the role of current prescription drug use and health risks, related expectations, and subjective factors in the demand for prescription...

Physically inactive people are expected to use more healthcare services than active people. This inactivity imposes costs on the collectively funded health insurance programs. In this paper, excess utilization of healthcare services due to physical inactivity is examined using count data models...

This paper proposes a novel two-stage approach to modeling health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) outcomes. The approach allows a patient-centered interpretation by estimating regression coe fficients based on the multi-dimensional HRQoL profi le, but maintains the parsimony of the...

This paper reconsiders the equity issue in Swedish health care utilisation previously analyzed by Gerdtham (Health Economics 6, 303-319, 1997) within the framework of the standard two-part model. Departing from the user/nonuser distinction, we use the more flexible framework of the finite...

We study the impact of climatic conditions on self-reported financial and subjective wellbeing indicators. To inform the climate policy debate, we conduct a unique multi-domain analysis of how monthly weather measurements (sunshine, rainfall, temperature anomaly) relate to financial evaluators...

The increasing rate of obesity in the U.S., particularly among low income households, necessitates a thorough understanding of the relationship between obesity and in-kind federal benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program. However,...

In 2004, the German Social Health Insurance introduced a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. I combine a structural model of health care demand and a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the effect of that reform on the number of visits. In the model, the...