Illness increases with age. All else being equal, an older population has greater needs for health care. This logic has led to dire protections of skyrocketing costs - apocalyptic demography. Yet numerous studies have shown tha aging effects are relatively small, and all else is not equal. Cost...

In this paper we outline a formal and comprehensive analytic framework in which income transfers - the principal effects of user charges - can be traced between groups in the population, between payers and health care providers, and among providers.

Canada's system of universal public insurance for health care is by considerable margin the nation's most successful and popular public program.

Call for user fees in Canadian health care go back as far as the debate leading up to the establishment of Canada's national hospital insurance program in the late 1950s. Although the rationales have shifted around somewhate, some of the more consistent claims have been that user fees are...

This paper has attempted to identify characteristic patterns of performance in tax-financed (TF) systems, contrasting them with systems relying more heavily on other revenue sources.

In this paper we examine why user charges exist for some health care services and not for others.