health economists look towards health care sector as a market whereby there is a distinct demand and supply phenomenon exists. dearth of regulation of the doctors' practices lead to inappropriate and unjustifiable demand for health care among the patients. in developing and under-developed countries, this adverse practice may push a poor family into a vicious circle of poverty and illness, espe...

This study estimates the percentage of health care expenditures in the non-institutionalized United States (U.S.) adult population associated with levels of physical activity inadequate to meet current guidelines. Leisure-time physical activity data from the National Health Interview Survey (2004-2010) were merged with health care expenditure data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (2006...

Both clinical diagnoses and self-rated measures of mental illness are associated with a variety of outcomes, including physical well-being, health utilization, and expenditure. However, much of current literature primarily utilizes clinically diagnosed data.This cross-sectional study explores the impact of mental illness and health care expenditure using 2 self-rated measures: self-rated measur...

ABBREVIATIONS. MEPS, Medical Expenditure Panel Survey; HCUP, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project; AHCPR, Agency for Health Care Policy and Research; HC, Household Component; MPC, Medical Provider Component; IC, Insurance Component; ICD-9-CM, International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification; SID, State Inpatient Databases; NIS, Nationwide Inpatient Sample; AHA, A...

The medical-care sector often experiences changes in medical protocols and technologies that cause shifts in treatments. However, the commonly used medical-care price indexes reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics hold the mix of medical services fixed. In contrast, episode expenditure indexes, advocated by many health economists, track the full cost of disease treatment, even as treatments...

Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey for 2000 and 2002, we compared potential and realized use of health care for a national sample of working-age women with cognitive disabilities. Despite having similar likelihoods of potential access to health care as compared to nondisabled women, they had markedly worse rates of receiving cervical cancer and breast cancer screenings, simila...

We propose a measure of household exposure to particularly onerous medical expenses. The measure can be decomposed into the probability that medical expenditure exceeds a threshold, the loss due to predictably low consumption of other goods if it does and the further loss arising from the volatility of medical expenses above the threshold. Depending on the choice of threshold, the measure is co...

OBJECTIVES To assess medical care and costs of the 3 highest prevalence lumbar disorders-non-specific low back pain (nLBP), intervertebral disc disorder (IDD) and spinal stenosis (SS)-from national billing data to provide basic information for standards of appropriate management. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of National Health Insurance National Patient Sample data provided by the Korean Hea...

Myanmar has a high proportion of out-of-pocket (OOP) health care expenditures with limited cost-sharing mechanisms. In Myanmar, there were limited data on the frequency of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) due to OOP payments, as well as on the factors associated with CHE. This study aimed to investigate health care expenditure, the frequency of CHE, and the factors influencing CHE among ho...

Background Cardiovascular disease poses a great financial risk on households in countries without universal health coverage like Ethiopia. This paper aims to estimate the magnitude and intensity of catastrophic health expenditure and factors associated with catastrophic health expenditure for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease in general and specialised cardiac hospitals in Addi...