The health care systems of the EU-member states are based on the social principle but to a different extent, and there are also differences in funding the health care expenditures. Some systems are financed by taxes, others by insurance premiums. Actually to become a member of a specific EU...

The nudge concept developed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein has turned out to be a very important one. The paper begins by considering the basic elements of the nudge concept as well as the philosophy of libertarian paternalism; it also considers later nudge writings, notably those by...

We use four states that were early adopters of Medicaid expansion to study how this expansion affects enrollment and access to physicians for Medicaid enrollees. We use the universe of Medicaid enrollment and claims data to construct state-month-level measures of enrollment, enrollee...

With the passage of Act 48 in May 2011, Vermont has become the first U.S. state to enact a law for a universal, publicly financed health care system. The state is on course for implementing a single payer system by 2017. This first breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for universal health...

An Index of Drinking Water Adequacy (referred to as IDWA-I in this paper) was first proposed in 2007 for 23 member countries of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and formed part of the Asian Water and Development Outlook (AWDO), 2007 brought out by the ADB. IDWA-I was obtained by averaging 5...

Independent of the left-right model of ideological structure, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food and agriculture are resented across the political spectrum in Switzerland. In the absence of any real experience with genetically modified (GM) food but faced with continuous exposure to...

Notwithstanding the general acceptance of the value of statistical life (VSL) estimates for policy assessment purposes, several important unresolved issues remain. First, the results from revealed preference studies are systematically higher than those from stated preference studies, potentially...

President Barack Obama, former U.S. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and others propose a new government agency that would evaluate the relative effectiveness of medical treatments. The need for "comparative-effectiveness research" is great. Evidence suggests Americans spend $700 billion...

For the first fifty years of its existence, Medicaid suffered from a serious defect. While it was adopted to meet the health care needs of the poor, it only met the needs of the so-called “deserving” poor — children, pregnant women, single caretakers of children, and disabled persons —...

We evaluate the demand for long term care (LTC) insurance prospects in a stated preference context, by means of the results of a choice experiment carried out on a representative sample of the Emilia-Romagna population. Choice modelling techniques have not been used yet for studying the demand...