Many other countries face similar economic challenges around healthcare spending, yet their policy response is somewhat different than what we have traditionally seen in Australia. In a number of countries including Canada and some parts of Europe there is a move to more explicit and transparent decision making and priority setting processes. These processes include resource allocation (investm...

There is widespread agreement that the US healthcare system wastes as much as 5% of GDP, yet little consensus on what care is actually unproductive. This partly arises because of the endogeneity of patient choice of treatment location. This paper uses the effective random assignment of patients to ambulance companies to generate comparisons across similar patients treated at different hospitals...

Increasingly the governments are facing pressures to increase budgetary allocations to social sectors. Recently there has been suggestion to increase the government budget allocations to health sector and increase it to 3 per cent of GDP. Is this feasible goal and in what time-frame? Health being State subject in India and much depends on the ability of the State governments to allocate higher ...

Bitcoin’s core innovation is its solution to double-spending, called Nakamoto consensus. This mechanism provides a probabilistic guarantee that transactions will not be reversed once they are sufficiently deep in the blockchain, assuming an attacker controls a bounded fraction of mining power in the network. We show, however, that when miners are rational this guarantee can be undermined by a w...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the effects of high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) and consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) on healthcare spending and on the use of recommended preventive care. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective study. METHODS We analyzed claims and enrollment data for 808,707 households from 53 large US employers, 28 of which offered HDHPs or CDHPs. We estimated the effects of HDHP or...

The authors make a useful and original contribution to evaluating the impact of strengthened patent protection of pharmaceuticals on Canadian healthcare expenditures. This commentary argues that their second task - measuring the impact of strengthened patent protection on R&D spending in Canada - faces an insurmountable conceptual problem: Corporate decisions on the location of R&D activities b...

This report contains information from the Health Policy Summit, held in conjunction with the Fifth Annual Primary Care Conference and the Tenth Annual HeLa Women's Health Conference. During the Summit's presentation, the Honorable Newt Gingrich offered key elements of his "Vision for a 21st Century Medicaid Solution." The vision focuses on developing a "21st Century Responsible Citizen Medicaid...

BI&T: How can wireless technology help to lower health-care costs? Joseph Smith: Even a superficial view of U.S. health-care spending would suggest there should be many opportunities to reduce overall healthcare costs while simultaneously increasing both quality and access. After all, we lead the world by a substantial margin in per-cap-ita spending on healthcare, while we rank well down the li...

We review Greek public sector healthcare policies and health-related outcomes since 2010.We find that excess spending was successfully curtailed, elements of the institutional framework were modernized, health have been relatively favorable. However, especially prior to Covid-19, had compressed potentially unsustainable levels, with widening inequalities large unmet needs, among poor. Higher ad...