Medical costs are among the most significant factors in determining long run fiscal requirements for the federal budget of the United States, and for the individual household budgets of retirees. Rapid growth and high individual variance make projections of future expenditures in the 20 to 50...

Section I of this chapter briefly reviews the literature on medical spending, which suggests that health expenditures began small but steadily increased throughout history (from 1 percent to 4 percent of GDP), then began to increase rapidly among wealthier developed countries after 1950. Section...

The nation's spending for prescription drugs has grown dramatically in recent years. Previous studies have shown that the replacement of older drugs by newer, more expensive, drugs is the single most important reason for this increase, but they did not measure how much of the difference between...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% G from 69.7 to 76.5 years G and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. While life expectancy has tended to increase, there...

All countries are investing in the development of electronic health (clinical) records, but only some countries are moving forward the possibility of data extraction for research, statistics and other uses that serve the public interest. This study reports on the development and use of data from...

Between 1960 and 1997, life expectancy at birth of Americans increased approximately 10% from 69.7 to 76.5 years and it has been estimated that the value of life extension during this period nearly equaled the gains in tangible consumption. While life expectancy has tended to increase, there...

Digital technologies are bringing vast improvements to modern society but also carry the risk of perpetuating disparities if adopted at lower rates by underserved communities. We investigate the efficiency and equity aspects of technological advancement in digital health by studying an...

We examine the price of treating episodes of acute phase major depression over the 1991-1996 time period. We combine data from a large retrospective medical claims data base (MarketScanTM, from the MedStat Group) with clinical literature and expert clinical opinion elicited from a two-state...

Innovative products form the foundation for the international success of electromedical technology in Germany. This is shown both in the strong sales achieved by the German medical technology segment compared with other industrial countries and the export share of more than 70%, which even...

We provide comparable evidence on the patterns and trends in obesity across the Atlantic and analyse whether there are economic rationales for public intervention to control obesity. We take into account equity issues as well as efficiency considerations, which are organized around three...