Background. Health risks such as tobacco use, excessive alcohol consumption and unhealthy body weight contribute to the development of chronic health problems. Objective. To estimate the associations of tobacco use, excessive alcohol consumption and obesity with healthcare expenditure and chronic diseases among South Africans on a comprehensive medical scheme. Methods. We performed a cross-sect...

BACKGROUND The American Heart Association's 2020 Strategic Goals emphasize the value of optimizing risk factor status to reduce the burden of morbidity and mortality. In this study, we aimed to quantify the overall and marginal impact of favorable cardiovascular risk factor (CRF) profile on healthcare expenditure and resource utilization in the United States among those with and without cardiov...

With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), access to insurance and coverage of preventive care services has been expanded. By removing the barrier of shared costs for preventive care, it is expected that an increase in utilization of preventive care services will reduce the cost of chronic diseases. Early detection and treatment is anticipated to be less costly than treatment at ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE This paper explores the relation between healthcare expenditures (HCEs) and environmental variables in Ontario, Canada. DESIGN The authors used a sequential two stage regression model to control for variables that may influence HCEs and for the possibility of endogenous relations. The analysis relies on cross sectional ecological data from the 49 counties of Ontario. MAIN RE...

BACKGROUND During recent decades, increase in both health care expenditures and improvement of the awareness as well as health expectations have created some problems with regard to finance healthcare expenditures so that the issue of health financing by households has been determined as a major challenge in health sector. According to the definition by the World Health Organization, catastroph...

In 1961, a new and mandatory National Health Insurance plan was enacted in Japan. This healthcare system has succeeded in providing universal coverage while also containing the growth of national medical expenditures (NME) to the rate of growth of the gross national product (GNP), namely, approximately 4-5% annually, for several decades. All Japanese medical procedures, including dental procedu...

Drug therapy accounts for a major portion of health expenditure. A useful strategy for achieving cost efficient healthcare is drug utilisation research as it forms the basis for making amendments in drug policies and helps in rational drug use. The present observational study was conducted to generate data on drug utilization in inpatients of our tertiary care hospital to identify potential tar...

• Context The healthy ageing assumptions may lead to substantial changes in paths of aggregate healthcare expenditures, notably catastrophic expenditures of people at the end of the life. But clear assessments of involved amounts are not available when we specifically consider ambulatory care (as drug expenditures) generally offered to chronically-ill people who can remain in this health-status...

BACKGROUND Examination of expenditures in areas where more universal application of effective injury prevention approaches is indicated could identify specific mechanisms and age groups where effective intervention may impact public injury-related expenditures. METHODS The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project 2003 (KID-HCUP) contains acute care hospitalization data for U.S. children and ad...