Mobile payments—those initiated on a mobile device such as a cell phone or tablet computer—have received a significant amount of attention recently. Yet, despite the attention, mobile payments have not been widely adopted in the United States. While industry experts agree mobile payments eventually will take off, there are many barriers. Some barriers are on the supply side—for example, the dif...

This paper compares egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay or ATP) and minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments do not exceed a pre-specified proportion of pre-payment income, or do not drive households into poverty). We develop indices for both sets of approaches. In the first, we compare the “agnostic” approac...

BACKGROUND Payments for red blood cell (RBC) transfusions are separate from US Medicare bundled payments for dialysis-related services and medications. Our objective was to examine the economic burden for payers when chronic dialysis patients receive outpatient RBC transfusions. METHODS Using Truven Health MarketScan® data (1/1/02-10/31/10) in this retrospective micro-costing economic analysi...

Direct out-of-pocket payments for healthcare continue to be a major source of health financing in low-income and middle-income countries. Some of these direct payments take the form of informal charges paid by patients to access the needed healthcare services. Remarkably, however, little is known about the extent to which these payments are exercised and their determinants in the context of Sub...

New strategies to control U.S. health spending growth are urgently needed. Although provider payment cuts are likely, cutting fee-for-service (FFS) payments will hurt quality and access. A more sensible approach would be to restructure the delivery system into organized networks of providers delivering reliable, evidence-based care. But restructuring will not occur without payment policy reform...

Many studies find that households increase their consumption after the receipt of expected income payments, a result inconsistent with the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis. Consumption can increase adverse health events, such as traffic accidents, heart attacks and strokes. In this paper, we examine the short-term mortality consequences of income receipt. We find that mortality increases ...

The Medicare program is the nation's largest single source of funds for graduate medical education. The program pays teaching hospitals for the direct costs of their residency programs and, since 1983, has paid for some of the indirect costs of graduate medical education. The rationale for, and extent of, the payments for indirect costs have been debated for years; recently, Congress has reduce...

Who pays for health care? To what extent are payments toward health care related to ability to pay? Is the relationship proportional? Or is it progressive; do health care payments account for an increasing proportion of ability to pay (ATP) as the latter rises? Or, is there a regressive relationship, in the sense that payments comprise a decreasing share of ATP? The policymaker’s preferred rela...