With prospective payment of hospitals becoming more common, measuring their performance is gaining in importance. However, the standard cost frontier model yields biased efficiency scores because it ignores technological heterogeneity between hospitals. In this paper, efficiency scores are...

Ireland’s health system is at a key turning point. The Irish government was newly elected in February 2011, and the policy directions adopted over the coming months will likely exert a major impact on system performance for many years. Drawing on recent international experience with...

The absent or poorly functioning risk pooling mechanisms and high amounts of out-of-pocket payments for health care expose households to financial risks associated with major illnesses or accidents. The aim of this paper is to analyse the extent to which out-of-pocket health spending impoverish...

This paper examines how ownership affects professional behaviour, treatment quality and patient satisfaction in the case of hip replacements in Ireland. We use quantitative data for public hospitals and the author’s own surveys for the private sector and qualitative data from 12 interviews,...

In their article “Collaboration between Public Health and Law Enforcement: New Paradigms and Partnerships for Bioterrorism Planning and Response,” Butler et al. (Emerg Infect Dis 2002;8;1152-6.) present a valuable introduction to the practical problems of coordinating public health and criminal...

Public health emergencies pose special challenges for law enforcement, whether the threat is manmade (e.g., the anthrax terrorist attacks) or naturally occurring (e.g., flu pandemics). Policing strategies will vary depending on the cause and level of the threat, as will the potential risk to the...

A health care system is efficient when an increase in spending results in significant improvements in the health of a population. We test the relative efficiency of public and private health care spending in reducing infant and child mortality using cross-national data for 163 countries. There...

Objective. To assess relationships between changes in Medicare Advantage (MA) payment rates and Medicare beneficiary hospitalizations and to simulate the effects of scheduled payment cuts on ambulatory care sensitive and elective hospitalization rates. Data. State Inpatient Database discharge...