In the United States, two patients with the same medical condition can receive drastically different treatments. In addition, the same patient can walk into two physicians’ offices and receive equally disparate treatments. This chapter attempts to understand why. It focuses on three areas: the...

There are widespread differences in health care spending and utilization across regions of the US as well as in other countries. Are these variations caused by demand-side factors such as patient preferences, health status, income, or access? Or are they caused by supply-side factors such as...

Demands for ramping up health expenditures are at an all-time high. Countries’ needs for additional health resources include responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, closing gaps in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal in health in most emerging and developing countries, and serving an...

While the long-term consequences of unmet child mental health needs are well-documented, out-of-pocket costs remain an important barrier to accessing medication in childhood and adolescence. This paper exploits the implementation of a public drug insurance program in Québec, Canada, to estimate...

In the policy debate, there are regular demands to further increase the retirement age to address the financial challenges for the pension system. However, a prolonged working life impacts a person’s health. Detailed data from the statutory health insurance companies shows that abolishing the...

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify existing healthcare processes and create new, more efficient ones is a major topic of discussion in the industry. Yet healthcare lags other industries in AI adoption. In this paper, we estimate that wider adoption of AI could lead to...

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values. Such heavy tails can be a threat to the commonly adopted least squares methods. To accommodate extreme values, we propose the use of an estimation method that recovers the often ignored right tail of health expenditure distributions....