Real reforms attempt to change how health care is financed and how it is rationed. Three main explanations have been offered for why such reforms are so difficult: institutional gridlock, path dependency and societal preferences. The latter posits that choices made regarding the health care...

Health-related external benefits are of potentially large importance for public policy. This paper investigates health-related external benefits using a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment framed in a health care context and including choice scenarios defined by six attributes related...

We conducted a literature review of studies on Physician Assistants working in a variety of settings and found few evaluation studies on the costs and/or effectiveness of Physician Assistants in primary care practices, Emergency Departments and in hospital settings other than Emergency...

Beginning in 1999, Ontario introduced pay-for-performance incentives for selected preventive primary care services and defined sets of other services provided by family physicians, with the goal of improving the quality of patient care. These performance incentives were considerably expanded in...

Debate over the effects of public versus private health care financing has been, and continues to be, active in both academic outlets and policy circles. Theoretical literature on parallel health care financing is often built on untested behavioural assumptions and the empirical evidence...

We examine the influence of incentives on response, retention, drop-out, completeness and speed of response, consistency of response and respondent characteristics in a mixed-mode survey in which initial contact was via regular mail and respondents completed the survey online. We study four...

Policy debate about funding criteria for drugs used to treat rare, orphan diseases is gaining prominence. This study presents evidence from a discrete choice experiment investigating the preferences of the public regarding public funding for drugs used to treat rare diseases and common diseases...

Greater recognition by economists of the influential role that concern for distributional equity exerts on decision making in a variety of economic contexts has spurred interest in empirical research on the public judgments of fair distribution. Using a stated-preference experimental design,...

Critical illness insurance (CII) is a fixed-reimbursement scheme conditioned on the event of a loss, not the size of the loss. We investigate demand for CII. Consumers will be willing to purchase CII depending on their degree of risk aversion to the cost of treating illness, their forgone...

• The production of health, illness and recovery in populations is a complex process that embodies a wide range of influences and interactions between influences • Economic evaluation approaches oversimplify the decision-makers' problem by adopting inappropriate research paradigm that...