OBJECTIVE To estimate the societal economic burden and the governmental budgetary impact of the following visual disorders among US adults aged 40 years and older: visual impairment, blindness, refractive error, age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, and primary open-angle glaucoma. DESIGN We estimated 3 components of economic burden: direct medical costs, other di...

Under the table or informal payments in several middle and low income countries is a serious impediment to health care reform. These payments are effectively a form of systemic corruption. This report shows the efforts of a patient who seek health care for his ankle while being requested to pay under the table in hospital and private clinic. The data were collected by interview and surveying pa...

AIMS To survey methods for cost control of out-of-hours laboratory services in district general hospitals in England and Wales. METHODS A questionnaire was distributed to 66 district general hospital laboratories in England and Wales. RESULTS The response rate was 61%. Most laboratories for which budgetary information was provided had on-call costs ranging between 10-21% of staff costs. Nin...

The primary aim of the study was to estimate costs of treatment for the first year after renal transplantation from the perspective of health insurance organizations in Iran. An Excel-based and a Monte Carlo model were developed to determine the treatment costs of current clinical practice in renal transplantation therapy (RTT). Inputs were derived from Ministry of Health and insurance organiza...

Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of scholarly literature written on online payments, few authors have combined these two issues to take a look at online donations. Accepting donations online helps nonprofits, which typically face budgetary constraints, to accomplish their tasks more effectively and efficiently and to put their resour...

The allocation problem in health care can be characterised as a mathematical programming problem but attempts to incorporate uncertainty in costs and effect have suffered from important limitations. A two-stage stochastic mathematical programming formulation is developed and applied to a numerical example to explore and demonstrate the implications of this more general and comprehensive approac...

U.S. federal budget dynamics, as a major attribute of the legislative and bureaucratic decision-making processes, increasingly calls into question the scholarly focus on incrementalism. What constitutes a “small” change is largely unspecifi ed in previous research that has also been unable to assess incrementalism across multiple levels of aggregation. Using a unique budgetary database, this ar...