Publicly financed health care provides access to a package of valuable core services to all Canadians—services that provide necessary care when needed and help improve the health and well-being of Canadians. In addition to being a valuable public service, publicly financed health care plays another role that is often overlooked: it redistributes income among different socio-economic groups. In ...

Is su e Br ie f ® • This Issue Brief analyzes recent literature about trends in the employment-based health care benefits system, proposed “market-driven” approaches to health care financing, and implications for consumers of the effect of rising costs on employment-based benefits. It examines the readiness of consumers to become more responsible for making health care financing decisions on th...

This paper employs a distribution-free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on Finnish data. In distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement, the difference between the Lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxe...

One of the many important ethical issues raised by health care systems is how best to sustain equity. As conflicting individual interests are inevitable within a health care system, issues of fairness are bound to arise. Changes in the structure of a health care system are thus key events that can affect equity in important ways. Using the "Benchmarks of Fairness" approach, we assessed the poss...

The complex financing system that supports health care spending in the US makes estimation of the incidence of financing both daunting and important. A significant portion of financing is embedded in the tax system at all levels of government, while tax expenditures that subsidize private purchases implicitly transfer a large share of financing from private to public revenue sources. We compute...

This paper employs the method of Aronson et al. (1994) to decompose the redistributive effect of the Dutch health care financing system into three components: a progressivity component, a classical horizontal equity component and a reranking component. Results are presented for the health care financing system as a whole, as well as for its constituent parts. A final section sets out to uncover...

BACKGROUND The demands in hospitals for safety and quality, combined with limitations in financing health care require effective cooperation between physicians and managers. The complex relationship between both groups has been described in literature. We aim to add a perspective to literature, by developing a questionnaire which provides an opportunity to quantitatively report and elaborate on...

In a wide-ranging look at many aspects of health care financing and delivery, the concepts of glasnost and perestroika are used as a framework for presenting ideas from the American system that may have value for European health care planners. These include more uniform approaches to data collection and cost reporting, patient outcome studies, evaluation of service and access standards, publica...

Health care spending has grown almost twice as fast as has the gross national product since 1965. Various parties in the health care financing arena have been affected to different degrees by this rising health care spending. As discussed in this article, households, businesses, and government all have had to devote increasing shares of their resources to financing health care. Although busines...

This paper presents the results of a ten-country comparative study of health care financing systems and their progressivity characteristics. It distinguishes between the tax-financed systems of Denmark, Portugal and the U.K., the social insurance systems of France, the Netherlands and Spain, and the predominantly private systems of Switzerland and the U.S. It concludes that tax-financed systems...