labonté et al provide an insightful analysis of the trans-pacific partnership (tpp) and its impact on a selection of important health determinants. their work confirms concerns raised by previous analyses of leaked drafts and offers governments serious and timely reasons to carefully consider provisions of the agreement prior to moving forward with ratification. it also contributes more general...

background and purpose: health indices, regarding to their role in the development of society, are one of the most important indices at national level. success of national development programs is largely dependent on the establishment of appropriate goals at the health sector, among which access to healthcare facilities is an essential requirement. the aim of this study was to examine the dispa...

we typically think of acutely and chronically mentally ill patients as those who belong in psychiatric hospitals and the latter category of patients belonging in “regular” hospitals, but the intersection of physical and mental illness draws attention to important challenges for policy-makers and organizational leaders. this article illuminates some broad trends in the health status of people wi...

after having practicing and researching health economics for nearly 15 years now, it has become clear to me that the use of cost-effectiveness data in priority setting decisions is rather a rare than a common practice. the eckard et al.article though, describes a wonderful exception to this rule and a very good example of how it can be used when the conditions are right. however, do we fully un...

this perspective is an ethical brief overview and examination of “wellness” policies in the modern workplace using practical examples and a general application of utilitarianism. many employers are implementing policies that provide incentives to employees who lead a “healthy” lifestyle. the authors address how these policies could adversely affect “non-healthy” employees. there are a wide vari...

Vidhi Thakkar and Terrence Sullivan have done a careful and thought-provoking job in trying to establish comparable estimates of public spending on health services and policy research (HSPR) in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their main recommendation is a call for an international collaboration to develop common terms and categories of HSPR. This paper raises two additional q...

Under the pressure of health care reform in the 1990s, interactions among the state, sickness funds, and providers in Germany are said to have entered a new era. We examine this new era by assessing both long-term developments connected to German statutory health insurance (SHI) and related short-term developments of the 1990s. Highly institutionalized rules and practices provide little opportu...

background the inclusion of cost-effectiveness data, as a basis for priority setting rankings, is a distinguishing feature in the formulation of the swedish national guidelines. guidelines are generated with the direct intent to influence health policy and support decisions about the efficient allocation of scarce healthcare resources. certain medical conditions may be given higher priority ran...

In this article, we analyze the policy and office motivations of parties in coalition-formation processes at the German federal-state level. We utilize a model developed by Sened that considers both motivations simultaneously and introduces a method by which to estimate its key parameters using data of German state-level coalition-formations.