China has made great progress in improving maternal and child health (MCH). It reduced maternal deaths from 1,500 per 100,000 live births and over 200 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 1949 to 120 per 100,000 live births and infant deaths to 42 per 1,000 by 1990. Currently China is on track...

Examines the relationship between rising Medicare risk and Medicare+Choice enrollment and the claims experience reported by Medigap insurers between 1996 and 1999. Concludes that adverse selection into Medicare HMOs has probably reduced average medical claims in standard Medigap plans, with a...

In 1990, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) ended lifelong certification by initiating a 10-year Maintenance of Certification (MOC) program that first took effect in 2000. Despite the importance of this change, there has been limited research examining associations between the MOC...

The end of long-standing exclusive contracts between the dominant Greenville Hospital System and two major health plans, coupled with increased hospital expansion, suggests health care costs will continue to rise in Greenville.

This HSC publication notes that insured consumers may face sticker shock at pharmacy counters as health plans take more aggressive steps, such as three-tier pharmacy benefits, to control rapidly rising drug costs. Under a three-tier design, consumers typically incur the lowest out-of-pocket...

Good practice suggests that budget allocations should reflect spending priorities and that spending should provide cost-effective delivery of public goods and services. This paper analyzes the composition of public expenditure in the Slovak Republic. It also assesses the relative efficiency of...

Purpose – As a result of the aging of American society, health care costs have been and will continue to rise, to the extent that they are not sustainable. Obviously, this trend will continue in spite of the 2010 health care reform. As a result of this uncontrollable problem, writers such as...

We present an overlapping-generations (OLG) macroeconomic model that applies a behavioral interpretation of preferences for goods that generate health risks. In this paper proneness to poor health is viewed as a cognitive miscalculation by economic agents between their expected health state over...

A consensus exists that rising income levels and technological development are among the key drivers of total health spending. However, determinants of public sector health expenditure are less well understood. This study examines a complex relationship across government health expenditure...