I n the past couple of years, several investigations by the Offi ce of the Inspector General (OIG) of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) have drawn attention to the use of recruitment incentives in research. In 2003, Toronto's Globe and Mail reported that the pharmaceutical company Biovail became the subject of an investigation because it paid $1,000 per patient to American p...

n engl j med 357;14 www.nejm.org october 4, 2007 1365 decade. They’ve been able to do so by offering greater speed and efficiency in conducting clinical trials than academic groups can, but questions have been raised about their qualifications, ethics, accountability, and degree of independence from their pharmaceutical-industry clients. Annual CRO-industry revenues have increased from about $7...

In the 21st century world, people mostly behave with business-mentality without considering moral obligations in society. this behavioral change, service-market, particularly Medical-care service-market is appeared to be vulnerable. Because of supplying medical-care services, doctor or hospital receives capitation payments, fees-for-services, risk pool settlements, incentive payments other fees...

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 ...