Background: In health economic evaluation, utility associated with a health state is outcome-oriented and usually measured using the QALY methodology. Even though there is consistent evidence of utility not only being derived from outcomes but also from procedures, process utility has not been...

In the March 2024 issue, Wirtschaftsdienst published an article entitled "Inflation calculation: ECB Interest Rate Policy is Not Statistically Recognised as a Driver of Inflation" by Johannes Schwanitz. Manuel Rupprecht takes a different view in a reply; Schwanitz then explains his position in a...

The German Federal Government has initiated key projects and reforms for the future development of healthcare in Germany. These include political initiatives for deregulation, digitisation, and large-scale structural projects. However, rather than directly contributing to the relief of the...

Background The Affordable Care Act (ACA), enacted in 2010, aimed to improve healthcare coverage for American citizens. This study investigates the impact of Medicaid expansion (ME) under the ACA on the racial and ethnic com- position of nursing home admissions in the U.S., focusing on whether ME...

Objective: This study aims to investigate whether specific treatments or combinations of treatments are significantly associated with the profitability of Swiss acute-care hospitals under the current diagnosis-related group (S-DRG) reimbursement system, while accounting for differences between...

In response to the two waves of Covid-19 in 2020, the Italian government implemented a general lockdown in March, but geographically targeted policies during fall. We exploit this natural experiment to compare the effects of the two policies in a difference-in-differences design, leveraging a...

Globally, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has sparked unexpected and violent outbursts against doctors, nurses, and other health personnel. In the Indian context, studies on violence against doctors and other medical staff largely focus on supply-demand imbalances in health care,...

During the state of epidemic in Poland in 2020, all facilities providing medical services were subject to constant reorganization. Legal changes, which were introduced at a very rapid pace, did not allow the standardization of the work of the health service. Therefore, the assessment of the...

Upcoding in Medicare has been a topic of interest to economists and policy makers for nearly 40 years. While upcoding is generally understood as "billing for services at higher level of complexity than the service actually pro- vided or documented," it has a wide range of definitions within the...