State governments contract with health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to coordinate medical care for nearly 20 million Medicaid recipients. Identifying the causal effect of HMO enrollment on government spending and health care quality is difficult if, as is often the case, recipients have the option to enroll in a plan. To estimate the average effect of HMO enrollment, this paper exploits cou...

Medicaid was established in 1965 as a joint state and federal program to provide medical insurance to Americans who are poor and have disabilities, and it has grown from 1 percent to 3 percent of GDP. The source of Medicaid’s growth over the past 50 years must inform efforts to reform the program and slow spending. The literature on the political economy of Medicaid provides strong evidence of ...

Son yıllarda hizmet ihracatında artış yaşanan sektörlerinden birisi de sağlık turizmi olmuştur. Sağlık turisti sayısı ve turizm geliri artışında kuşkusuz küreselleşmenin, iletişim teknolojilerinin ulaşım imkanlarının gelişmesi, gelişmiş ülkelerde bekleme sürelerinin uzaması hizmetinde artan maliyet baskıları en önemli etken Ülkemizde politikalarının konularından haline gelen turizmi, ekonomik a...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the authors and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper assesses the distributional impact of the recent VAT r...

The Economic Case for Devoting Public Resources to Health The world has enjoyed huge improvements in population health during the last half century. But major health problems persist, particularly in tropical countries, which are still struggling with infectious diseases while increasingly having to deal with noncommunicable diseases. Several classic arguments for public spending on health have...

Religious Minorities and Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Rural West Bengal Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India concentration of religi...

We seek to explain why countries have adopted national Old-Age Insurance and Health Insurance programs. Theoretical work has posited several factors that could lead to this adoption: the strain from expanding capitalism; the need for political legitimacy; the desire to transfer to similar people; increased wealth; and the outcome of leviathan government. We relate the probability of a country’s...

This paper studies the impact of tax-financed universal health coverage schemes on macroeconomic aspects of labor supply, asset holding, inequality, and welfare, while taking into account features common to developing economies, such as informal employment and tax avoidance, by constructing a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents. Agents have different education...

Assessing the Effectiveness of Health Care Cost Containment Measures Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expend...

We compare state-of-the-art implementation of Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) and Cost Utility Analysis (CUA) as tools for making priorities in allocation of national public funds in the transport sector and health sector, respectively, in Sweden. While the principal distinctions between these methods are well known, less notice has been given to a number of other differences that have emerged as n...