BACKGROUND Using non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) as a case, we used Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) database, to empirically explore the association between policy interventions (price regulation, new drug entry, and an information shock) and drug expenditures, utilization, and market structure between 2001 and 2004. METHODS All NSAIDs prescribed in ambulatory visits i...

The movement for a national pharmacare plan in Canada is growing, but at the same time the multinational pharmaceutical companies and their supporters are critical of such a move. The three major arguments that they make are that all that is needed is to “fill in the gaps,” ie, cover those who currently are uninsured or underinsured, that private drug plans are superior to public ones because t...

BACKGROUND Reimbursement for outpatient prescription drugs is not mandated by the Canada Health Act or any other federal legislation. Provincial governments independently establish reimbursement plans. We sought to describe variations in publicly funded provincial drug plans across Canada and to examine the impact of this variation on patients' annual expenditures. METHODS We collected inform...

BACKGROUND It is not known what effect the increased use of prescription drugs by enrollees in Medicare Part D has had on spending for other medical care. METHODS We compared spending for prescription drugs and other medical care 2 years before the implementation of Part D in January 2006 with such expenditures 2 years after the program's implementation in four groups of elderly beneficiaries...

AIM To estimate how much governments in Australia spend on reducing and dealing with illicit drug problems. METHODS Government documents and supplementary information sources were used to estimate drug-related expenditure for the financial year 2002-03, in Australian dollars. Public sector expenditure on reducing drug problems ('proactive expenditure') was classified into four policy function...

BACKGROUND Multitiered, incentive-based formularies have been increasingly used as a mechanism to control prescription drug expenditures. Prescribing physicians who manage patients from multiple insurers must be familiar with the variability in their patients' formulary incentives to help patients choose therapy wisely. However, the degree of formulary variability among and within health plans ...

S S t t t t t u u u u u d d d d d ies ies ies ies ies Objectives: Previous studies have documented that overweight and obese adults have substantially higher medical care expenditures than adults of normal weight, but there is little comparable data for children or adolescents. This study examines medical care expenditure and utilization patterns in a sample of adolescents in North Carolina enr...

This paper analyzes whether the opportunity for physicians to dispense drugs increases healthcare expenditures. We study the case of Switzerland, where dispensing physicians face financial incentives to overprescribe and sell more expensive pharmaceuticals. Using comprehensive physician-level data, we exploit the regional variation in the dispensing regime to estimate causal effects. The empiri...

People enrolled in Medicare account for more than one-third of all outpatient prescription drug expenditures in the United States. That being the case, a proposed prescription drug benefit under the Medicare program would insure a substantial part of the market and would create the largest expansion of the program in the past 20 years. This article explains how the cost of a drug benefit was es...