Human resources are the single largest budget line in any healthcare organization. But employees are not costs; rather, they must be viewed by managers, boards, and governments as the core assets of the system.

BACKGROUND Governments and international donors have partnered to provide free HIV treatment to over 6 million individuals in low and middle-income countries. Understanding the determinants of HIV treatment costs will help improve efficiency and provide greater certainty about future resource needs. METHODS AND FINDINGS We collected data on HIV treatment costs from 54 clinical sites in Botswa...

Increasing health care costs and long waiting times for public care are growing sources of concern for governments in industrialized countries. In this paper, we investigate the impact of waiting times on the demand for care, ask whether allowing congestion to increase in order to contain ever growing health care costs is socially desirable, and predict the expected outcome of policies aiming a...

The increasing share of medical bills paid by third-party payers (insurance companies and governments) and the disastrous consequences are documented. Patients overuse medical resources since those resources appear to be free or almost free. Producers of medical equipment create new and more expensive devices, even if they are of only marginal benefit, since third-party payers create a guarante...

With rising health care costs, governments must develop innovative methods to deliver efficient and equitable health care services. With physician remuneration being the third largest health care expense, the design of remuneration methods is a priority in health care policy. Otolaryngology-Head and Neck surgeons should have an understanding of the behavioural incentives associated with differe...

One of the consequences of ineffective governments is that they leave space for unlicensed and unregulated informal providers without formal training to deliver a large proportion of health services. Without institutions that facilitate appropriate health care transactions, patients tend to navigate health care markets from one inappropriate provider to another, receiving sub-optimal care, befo...

whereas in other states similar roads are financed locally. Larger governments attain scale economies. However, they also tend to be more bureaucratic and have higher operating costs, all else being equal, because of problems such as span of control. A study was done to relate highway expenditures with the share of expenditure by state governments to determine how governments should allocate ex...

during the last two decades, decentralization has been supposed as a tool for making the public sector policies more efficient. despite the claimed benefits, there are some costs; some of decentralization theorists believe that devolution of pure public goods provision to local governments has led to the failure of decentralization policies. this article uses game theory to study the implicatio...