Background Measures taken over the past four years in Greece to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure have led to significant price reductions for medicines, but have also changed patient cost-sharing rates for prescription drugs. This study attempts to capture the resulting increase in patients’ out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses for prescription drugs during the 2011-2014 period.   Methods The authors ...

OBJECTIVES To provide the first nationally representative data on total health care expenses, out-of-pocket health care expenses, and information on the extent to which out-of-pocket expenses are financially burdensome for families of children with special health care needs (CSHCN). To also compare utilization and expenditure patterns for children with and without special health care needs. D...

BACKGROUND Expenses with coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery and coronary angioplasty (CA) represented a significant cost to SUS. OBJECTIVE To analyze SUS expenses with CABG and CA and their performance in hospitals in the state of Rio de Janeiro (SRJ), from 1999 to 2008. METHODS The information came from paid HAA in hospitals with more than 100 revascularization procedures. Mort...

PURPOSE To analyse the economic viability of a mobile eye clinic of a tertiary referral Ophthalmology Service. METHODS The amount of money spent with the purchase and construction of the unit in 2000, and the expenses with its maintenance and operation in 2001 were considered, comparing these expenses with the income obtained from appointments, supplementary tests and eye surgeries through th...

BACKGROUND A wide range of health care options are utilised by pregnant women in Australia. The out-of-pocket costs of maternity care in Australia vary depending on many factors including model of care utilised, health insurance coverage, and women's decision to access health services outside of conventional maternity care provision. METHODS Women from the 1973-78 cohort of the Australian Lon...

Apart from simple guesswork, time-series and regression techniques have largely dominated forecasting models for international tourism demand. This paper presents a new approach that uses a supervised feed-forward neural network model to forecast Japanese tourist arrivals in Hong Kong. The input layer of the neural network contains six nodes: Service Price, Average Hotel Rate, Foreign Exchange ...

Fraud and identity theft have been increasing with the use of e-commerce. In the U.S. alone, it has been estimated that victims may spend on average $1,500 in out-of-pocket expenses and an average of 175 hours in order to resolve the many problems caused by such identity thieves. Organizations that engage in e-commerce as a large part of their business need to protect their customers against th...

Using unique data on the Irish loan funds, a nineteenth-century system of quasi-banks, we show that higher levels of uncontrolled capital, where there is no residual claimant, lead to higher wages. The loan funds relied on deposits, as well as donations and accumulated profits, to finance their lending. We examine the effect of different levels of deposits and capital on managerial salaries and...

The insurance industry is known to have high operating expenses in the financial services sector. Insurers, investors and regulators are interested in models to understand the behavior of expenses. However, the current practice ignores skewness, occasional negative values as well as their temporal dependence. Addressing these three features, this paper develops a longitudinal model of insurance...