The purchaser/provider split within the NHS has highlighted the role of District Health Authorities (DHAs) in assessing health needs and buying services to meet those needs. This requires a consideration of what is meant by “need” and how it relates to a system of priorities for health care...

Five years after the implementation of the UK health and social care reforms it is still difficult to evaluate objectively their success or failure. It is an opportune time to stand back and assess what were the real objectives of the reforms, and what have been their essential features. The...

This paper traces the development of costing and pricing guidance as it relates to the operation of the NHS internal market (Sections 1 and 2). Such guidance has developed at least partly in response to the information deficiencies which undermine the Government’s somewhat mechanistic...

Contracting has played a central role in the NHS reforms as the principal mechanism by which resources are transferred from purchasers to providers. The nature, process and role of contracting are traced by examining the development of government policy on this issue since the inception of the...

In this paper we argue on the merits of theoretical simulation, a widely used technique in other areas of theoretical economics, to extending the phase diagram analysis of the Grossman's 1972 model of investment in health capital. We argue that theoretical simulations are particularly useful...

In the health economics literature there is an ongoing debate over approaches used to estimate the efficiency of health systems at various levels, from the level of the individual hospital- or nursing home –up to that of the health system as a whole. The two most widely used approaches to...

The time path of consumption from a rational addiction (RA) model contains information about an individual's tendency to be forward looking. In this paper, we use quantile regression (QR) techniques to investigate whether the tendency to be forward looking varies systematically with the level of...