This paper examines how the use of ‘authorized-generics’ (AGs) influences Canadian prescription drug prices. An authorized-generic is the actual brand name drug product, manufactured by the brand firm, but sold as a generic by a licensee or subsidiary of the brand, competing with independent...

Between 1970 and 1986 all Canadian provinces introduced some version of a prescription drug subsidy for those age 65 or over and since 1986, all the provinces have increased copayments or deductibles to some degree. Employing a first-order approximation to the welfare gains from a subsidy, we...

The question as to how society should support pharmaceutical (‘pharma’) innovation is both pertinent and timely: Pharma drugs are an integral component of modern health care and hold the promise to treat more effectively various debilitating health problems. The productivity of the pharma...

Several studies suggest that, on the basis of life expectancy (LE) regressions, new pharmaceutical drugs are responsible for some of the marked gains in LE observed over the last 50 years. We critically appraise these studies. We point out several modeling issues, including disentangling the...

Canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using different years of the Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey. Master files are used, expanding the number of available years and permitting provincial rather than regional identifiers. Nonparametric Engel curves are...

Health scientists often use observational data to estimate treatment effects when controlled experiments are not feasible. A limitation of observational research is non-random selection of subjects into different treatments, potentially leading to selection bias. The 2 commonly used solutions to...

Although there are several studies of the impact of employment of health professionals in large bureaucratic organizations, there has been significantly less research focused on the structural influence of patients on this relationship. In this paper we present comparative qualitative data...

This report is the Users' Manual that accompanies MEDS-E, the economic component of a new Windows-based version of the MEDS (Models of the Economic-Demographic System) software. MEDS-E is designed to make use of the all-Canada population and labour force projections from MEDS-D in projecting...

Four questions are addressed: (1) What is theory and how is it important in the development of knowledge about aging? (2) What is the state of theory in gerontology today? (3) Why has explicit theory development become devalued in gerontology during the past few decades? (4) How and why should...

Previous research (Gee, Kobayashi, Prus, 2004) indicates that foreign- born older adults (65 years and older) have poorer health than their Canadian-born counterparts. Using data from the 2000/2001 Canadian Community Health Survey, the current study tests two hypotheses to explain the health gap...