Protecting households from high out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for health care is an important health system goal. High OOP payments can push households into poverty and make them vulnerable to catastrophic health expenditures. This study, based in India, aims to: (a) estimate OOP payments for health and related impoverishment across economic groups; (b) decompose OOP payments and relate the cont...

Boston University Professor Richard Laing has described the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) as ‘the best drug pricing system in the world ... [and Australia as] the one country which seems to have got it right, that what you want to do in controlling costs is to pay what the drug is therapeutically worth’(Laing 2001). At a time when many countries are struggling with rising phar...

A systematic literature review on pharmaceutical companies may be a tool for guiding some procedures of R&D implementation in a department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. The use of pharmaceutical companies for this specific analysis arises from less variability of standards than healthcare facilities. In this qualitative and quantitative analysis, we focused on three useful areas of impl...

IMPORTANCE Hospitals are rapidly acquiring medical groups and physician practices. This consolidation may foster cooperation and thereby reduce expenditures, but also may lead to higher expenditures through greater use of hospital-based ambulatory services and through greater hospital pricing leverage against health insurers. OBJECTIVE To determine whether total expenditures per patient were ...

BACKGROUND Poor psychosocial workplace factors have been found to cause or exacerbate a variety of health problems, including pain. However, little work has focused on how psychosocial workplace factors, such as health-related employer support, relate to future medical expenditures after controlling for health. Health-related support has also not been well explored in previous literature as a p...

BACKGROUND Antiretroviral therapy has increased longevity for people living with HIV (PLWH). As a result, PLWH increasingly experience the common diseases of aging and the resources needed to manage these comorbidities are increasing. This paper characterizes the number and types of comorbidities diagnosed among PLWH covered by Medicare and examines how non-HIV comorbidities relate to outpatien...

PURPOSE Historical trends and factors likely to influence future pharmaceutical expenditures are discussed, and projections are made for drug spending in 2016 in nonfederal hospitals, clinics, and overall (all sectors). METHODS Drug expenditure data through calendar year 2015 were obtained from the IMS Health National Sales Perspectives database and analyzed. Other factors that may influence ...

OBJECTIVE To compare medical care costs and utilization in a consumer-driven health plan (CDHP) to other health insurance plans. STUDY DESIGN We examine claims and employee demographic data from one large employer that adopted a CDHP in 2001. A quasi-experimental pre-post design is used to assign employees to three cohorts: (1) enrolled in a health maintenance organization (HMO) from 2000 to ...

In 1981 Congress introduced Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) waivers in an attempt to contain Medicaid long-term care expenditures. This paper analyzes the efficacy of the waiver program. To date, little is known about its impact on cost containment. Using state-level Medicaid data on expenditures and the number of individuals participating in HCBS waivers between 1992 and 2000, this st...