BreastScreen Australia provides free mammography services to women in the target age group of 50 to 69 years. The program uses a variety of measures to recruit women to the service and, subsequently, encourage them to screen at two year intervals. One of the stated aims of the program is to...

The Medicare Safety Net Policy was introduced in March 2004 to provide financial relief for those Australians who face high out-of-pocket costs incurred through out-of-hospital medical services. This study examines variation in Safety Net benefits by federal electorate and by type of medical...

Introduction: Since 1991 State and Federal Governments, under the auspices of BreastScreen Australia, have been providing mammography services free at the point of delivery to women aged 40 and over. One of the stated aims of the program is to provide equitable access to all women in the target...

Objectives: The Medicare Safety Net Policy was introduced in March 2004 to provide financial relief for those Australians who face high out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for outpatient medical services. This study evaluates the extent to which out-of-pocket costs have fallen since the introduction of...

When consumers have private information about risk of suffering a loss, or equivalently, if insurers are prohibited from using observable information on risk in underwriting, theoretical models of insurance predict adverse selection. Yet the most common finding in empirical studies is that of no...

Both adverse selection and moral hazard models predict a positive relationship between risk and insurance; yet the most common finding in empirical studies of insurance is that of a negative correlation. In this paper we investigate the relationship between ex ante risk and private health...

Over 45% of Australians buy health insurance for private treatment in hospital. This is despite having access to universal and free public hospital treatment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one possible explanation for the high rate of insurance coverage is to avoid long waiting times for...

Since the early 1980s it has been identified that even though economic evaluation is considered useful by economist it is not widely used by health care decision-makers. One of the ways to close the gap is to involve decision-makers in the process. This project was set up to gain a better...

Objective: To provide decision makers with a tool to inform resource allocation decisions at the local level, using cardiovascular disease prevention as an example. Method: Evidence from the international literature was extrapolated to estimate the health and financial impacts in Central Sydney...