In Ireland, approximately 30% of the population receive free GP services ('medical card patients') while the remainder ('private patients') must pay for each visit. In 1989, the manner in which GPs were reimbursed by the State for their medical card patients was changed from fee-for-service to...

This paper examines the determinants of GP visiting in Ireland, using panel data from the Living in Ireland Survey from 1995-2001. While cross-sectional studies provide important information on GP visiting patterns at a certain point in time, with panel data we can also control for unobserved...

ABSTRACT To combat growing levels of obesity, health‐related taxes have been suggested with taxes on foods high in fat or sugar. Such taxes have been criticised on the basis of their regressivity and potentially adverse impact upon poverty. This paper analyses the effect of such taxes on a...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

When measuring health inequality using ordinal data, analysts typically must choose between indices specifically based upon ordinal data and more standard indices using ordinal data, which has been transformed into cardinal data. This paper compares inequality rankings across a number of...

The numbers buying private health insurance in Ireland have continued to grow, despite a broadening in entitlement to public care. About 40% of the population now have insurance, although everyone has entitlement to public hospital care. In this paper, we examine in detail the growth in...