Executive summary / 1 Introduction / 7 The particular impact of new or " patented " drugs on government health care costs / 8 The impact of all types of drugs on government health care costs / 18 The real cause of unsustainable growth in government health spending / 25 Research suggests that government health spending in Canada is growing at an unsus-tainable pace [Skinner and Rovere, 2006; 200...

Defensive Investments and the Demand for Air Quality: Evidence from the NOx Budget Program and Ozone Reductions Demand for air quality depends on health impacts and defensive investments that improve health, but little research assesses the empirical importance of defenses. We study an important cap-and-trade market, which dramatically reduced NOx emissions, a key ingredient in ozone formation....

In this paper we study the impact of reference pricing (RP) on entry of generic firms in the pharmaceutical market. For given prices, RP increases generic firms’expected profit, but since RP also stimulates price competition the impact on generic entry is theoretically ambiguous. In order to empirically test the effects of RP, we exploit a policy reform in Norway in 2005 that exposed a subset o...

Pharmaceutical policy in Canada is set at both the federal and provincial levels of government. The federal government is responsible for intellectual property rights of manufacturers (patents) and the initial approval and labelling of prescription drugs and for ensuring overall market competitiveness. The provincial government has responsibility and jurisdiction over the funding of all health ...

Methods This study was designed to assess and review current practice and policy in the Malaysia pharmaceutical procurement procedures of non-formulary medicines. This was a quantitative study and was conducted in a cross-sectional study design. A purposive sampling method was applied in the study sample selection. The targeted samples to be involved in the selection were the public healthcare ...

Economic barriers, along with regulatory complexity and uncertainty, are shaping the biosimilars industry into something entirely different from the generic small molecule pharmaceutical industry. The sharp demarcation between branded and generic small molecule pharmaceutical companies may not exist in the biologics context. The emerging biosimilars industry may present opportunities for both p...

BACKGROUND Universal Health Coverage seeks to assure that everyone can obtain the health services they need without financial hardship. Countries which rely heavily on out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, including informal payments (IP), to finance total health expenditures are not likely to achieve universal coverage. The Republic of Moldova is committed to promoting universal coverage, reducing ine...

BACKGROUND Monitoring the incidence and intensity of catastrophic health expenditure, as well as the impoverishing effects of out of pocket costs to access healthcare, is a key part of benchmarking Kenya's progress towards reducing the financial burden that households experience when accessing healthcare. METHODS The study relies on data from the nationally-representative Kenya Household Expe...

Background Concerns about the long term sustainability of health care expenditures and in particular prescribing expenditures has become an important policy issue in most developed countries. Previous studies suggest that proximity to death (PTD) has a significant effect on total health care expenditures, with its exclusion leading to an overestimation of likely growth. There are limited studie...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the quantitative effects of the drug price reduction on pharmaceutical expenditures and the new guidelines to restrict prescribing on drug utilisation for antihypertensive drugs. DESIGN We used an interrupted time series design with the National patient sample data of Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service in South Korea. METHODS 54,295 participants who were w...