HIV continues to cause the largest number of disability-adjusted life years of any disease in HIV hyperendemic countries (i.e., countries with an adult HIV prevalence 15%). We compare the benefits and costs of two proven biological interventions to reduce the health losses due to the HIV...

Targeted treatments of newborns with delicate health stocks have been shown to have considerable returns in terms of survival and later life outcomes. We seek to determine to what degree such treatments are transmitted across generations. We follow three generations of linked micro-data from...

Cost-effectiveness analysis is versatile and used widely to assist in health care decision making. This chapter discusses how cost-effectiveness analysis is used at the system or national level, particularly in the domain of coverage and payment policy. We describe its relationship to other...

Health systems in Western countries are plagued by inefficiency and will likely require a substantial increase in the tax burden as populations age. Patients might also face a gradual decrease in the quality and scope of services. The organisational changes needed to drive costs down and...

This article investigates how the Swedish population values a reduction in the number of suicides in relation to other life-saving interventions within the health care sector. An online discrete choice experiment was conducted with a sample of 1000 Swedish members of the web panel Userneeds to...

Despite spending far more on medical care, Americans live shorter lives than the citizens of other high-income countries. The situation has been getting worse for at least three decades. This paper describes the main scientific methods for guiding the allocation of resources to health -...

Does regional decentralization threaten the commitment to regional equality in government outcomes? We attempt to shed light on this question by drawing on unique evidence from the largest European unitary states to have engaged in countrywide health system decentralization: Italy and Spain. We...

We estimate the health costs of supply-side barriers to accessing medical care. The setting is Colombia, where citizens have a constitutional right to health care, but insurance companies that manage delivery impose restrictions on access. We use administrative data on judicial claims for health...

OECD countries face the multiple challenges of rapidly ageing societies with the associated rise in chronic diseases and the ever-present threat from new or evolving communicable diseases. This is within the context of seeking better value for money from the health sector. While a growing body...