In 2012, the Chatham House established a Working Group on Health Financing, of which I was a member, to deliberate on a global framework for health financing (Røttingen et al., 2014) (reference to paper by McIntyre et al., 2017). Intensive discussions and exhaustive studies brought out 20 recommendations. Of them three were important points emphasizing the need for countries to (i) ensure a min...

Analysed in this paper are national health accounts estimates for 191 WHO Member States for 1997, using simple comparisons and linear regressions to describe spending on health and how it is financed. The data cover all sources - out-of-pocket spending, social insurance contributions, financing from government general revenues and voluntary and employment-related private insurance - classified ...

BACKGROUND Even though Africa has the highest disease burden compared with other regions, it has the lowest per capita spending on health. In 2007, 27 (51%) out the 53 countries spent less than US$50 per person on health. Almost 30% of the total health expenditure came from governments, 50% from private sources (of which 71% was from out-of-pocket payments by households) and 20% from donors. Th...

One of the glaring gaps in Canada’s universal healthcare system is the low level of public financing of prescription drugs - 42.7% of total spending in 2018. At the federal level there is renewed interest in moving towards universal coverage, supported by a recently commissioned report on how to achieve it. It will take superb political navigation to extract Canadian ph...

This paper investigates the impact of Medicare HMO penetration on the Medicare expenditures of fee-for-service enrollees. We find evidence that increasing penetration leads to reduced spending on fee-for-service beneficiaries. In particular, we find that a one percentage point increase in Medicare HMO penetration reduces such spending by about one percent. We estimate similar models for various...

Population Aging, Elderly Migration and Education Spending: Intergenerational Conflict Revisited Elderly have been increasingly targeted as a group to enhance economic development and the tax base in communities. While recent literature on elderly migration tends to focus on how elderly migration patterns are influenced by state fiscal variables, the reverse effect from elderly population on fi...

This paper examines the role of infrastructure in long run economic growth. The paper consists of two sections, the first concentrates on the theoretical role of government spending in models of growth and the second details examples of private participation in infrastructure development. Using a simple endogenous growth model we find that while the hypothesized benefits of infrastructure expen...

Japan's universal and egalitarian health care system helps to keep its population healthy at an exceptionally low cost. Its financing and delivery systems have been adapted over the years in a gradual way that preserves balance. In particular, its mandatory fee schedule has proved to be effective in controlling spending by manipulating prices. Today, with severe fiscal problems, pressures are m...