A generally accepted view is that it is more efficient and ethical if global pharmaceutical prices vary according to countries? relative income. To understand manufacturers? pricing strategies, we compared average pharmaceutical prices in fourteen middle-income countries to those in three...

High levels of pathogen resistance are rendering current antibiotics obsolete. Coupled with insufficient investment in discovering new treatments, multidrug-resistant infections are an increasingly urgent public health concern. To curb the growth of antibiotic resistance and prevent major...

This article uses panel data to investigate the extent of income-related inequity in the likelihood of visiting a General Practitioner (GP), specialist, dentist and hospital among individuals aged 65 years and over in the UK. The probability of accessing health care is predicted with separate...

In view of increasing cost pressures, this paper aims to provide guidance to national EU policy-makers faced with the challenge of reconciling financial sustainability of health systems with the safeguarding of the key underlying values of these health systems; namely universal coverage,...

A number of non-parametric estimators have been proposed to calculate average medical care costs in the presence of censoring. This paper assesses their performance both in terms of bias and efficiency under extreme conditions using a medical dataset which exhibits heavy censoring. The...

Pharmacoeconomic analyses have become useful and essential tools for health care decision makers who increasingly require such analyses prior to placing a drug on a national, regional or hospital formulary. Previous health economic models of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have...

Hospitals can be reimbursed for their costs in many ways. Several authors have investigated the effects of these reimbursement rules on physician incentives and, therefore, on the quantity of services provided to patients. A form of (linear) cost-sharing tends to emerge as the socially efficient...

A simulation model was constructed to assess the relative costs and cost-effectiveness of different screening and vaccination strategies for dealing with hospital incidents of varicella exposure, compared with current policies, using data from published sources and a hospital survey. The mean...

BACKGROUND: Family planning services are amongst the most highly utilized services in the National Health Service. There have, however, been few empirical studies of the costeffectiveness of these services. METHODS: Two measures of output were used to calculate the cost-effectiveness of family...

The size of national health care expenditure is an important research and policy issue. This paper reviews theoretical and empirical analyses of an implied optimal size for a health sector. Various economic theories are explicitly or implicitly invoked, but none is fully satisfactory. Theory...