Almost every country exhibits two important health financing trends: health spending per person rises and the share of out-of-pocket spending on health services declines. We describe these trends as a "health financing transition" to provide a conceptual framework for understanding health markets and public policy. Using data over 1995-2009 from 126 countries, we examine the various explanation...

The rising cost of cancer treatment competes with the availability of effective therapy as a limiting factor in our war on cancer. Specific programs are being developed that have the potential to slow the growth in spending on oncology care. The Affordable Care Act includes provisions for containing healthcare costs, such as accountable care organizations and the Independent Payment Advisory Bo...

Multiple national initiatives seek to curb spending to address increasing healthcare costs in the United States. The Choosing Wisely initiative is a popular initiative that focuses on reducing healthcare spending by setting guidelines to limit tests and procedures requested by patients and ordered by physicians. To reduce spending on neuroimaging, the Choosing Wisely initiative and other organi...

The health white paper has generated considerable debate, but there has been little discussion about the practical implementation of the processes underpinning its requirements. Many commentators have drawn parallels between some features of general practice commissioning and previous commissioning incarnations, such as fundholding and total purchasing pilots. However, the regulatory landscape ...

Many recent studies have attempted to accurately measure the expenditure by hospitals in the area of new information technology (IT), for example see Leonard 1998 and Pink et al. 2001. This is usually done as an exercise to compare the healthcare sector with other industries that have had much more success in implementing and leveraging their IT investment (Willcocks 1992; Chan 2000). It is nor...

OBJECTIVE Despite considerable advances in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, the burden of new infections of HIV and AIDS varies substantially across the country. Previous studies have demonstrated associations between increased healthcare spending and better HIV/AIDS outcomes; however, less is known about the association between spending on social services and public health spending an...

Nowadays due to the crisis, some government measures are aimed at reducing healthcare spending, affecting in some level or another the quality offered. Process management is said to be a useful tool for reducing healthcare costs by improving management without any additional economic investment. That is doing more with the same resources and without reducing the quality offered. In this study a...

Do countries with higher IT spending have higher life expectancy? Recent policy debate on healthcare in the United States has focused on the role of IT in reducing costs and improving healthcare access and quality. An implicit assumption in this debate has been that greater infusion of IT into healthcare will lead to better health outcomes. We investigate the validity of this assumption by exam...

As much as 30% of US health care spending in the United States does not improve individual or population health. To a large extent this excess spending results from prices that are too high and from administrative waste. In the public sector, and particularly at the state level, where budget constraints are severe and reluctance to raise taxes high, this spending crowds out social, educational,...

Higher prices, more readily accessible technology, and greater levels of obesity are probably the main reasons why the United States spends far more on healthcare than do other developed countries. The analysis was contained in a briefing paper prepared by the charity the Commonwealth Fund. The higher rate of spending cannot be attributed to higher income, an older population, or a greater supp...