OBJECTIVE A solid understanding of levels and trends of spending on cancer is important to evaluate whether our healthcare resources were wisely spent and to prioritize future resources for cancer treatment and prevention. However, studies on economic burden of cancers in China are scant and the results are inconsistent. METHODS The Chinese hospital information database and nearly 350 million...

BACKGROUND Aiming to align provider incentives toward improving quality and efficiency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is considering broader bundling of hospital and physician payments around episodes of inpatient surgery. Decisions about bundled payments would benefit from better information about how payments are currently distributed among providers of different perioperative...

One of the more intriguing empirical findings in recent years is evidence that a number of Third World economies experience a positive relationship between military expenditures and overall rates of economic growth. While this result has been found in a number of individual studies, no satisfactory explanation has been put forth -presumably defense expenditures have both positive spin-offs, ten...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of challenges to the U.S. economy, from skyrocketing unemployment state-wide lockdowns which hampered many small businesses. GDP dropped by 8.9% in second quarter 2020, and susceptible industries such as Restaurants, Hotels, Airlines faced brute these hardships. In response, government initiated enormous Keynesian spending programs inject liquidity into econ...

F incentives for improving quality and efficiency have gone mainstream in U.S. health care. After years of small-scale pilot projects, demonstrations, and experiments, the Affordable Care Act mandated that Medicare payment to hospitals and physicians must depend, in part, on metrics of quality and efficiency. The first program to do so is Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (HVBP), which began affe...