OBJECTIVES This article examines changes in household spending on health care between 1978 and 1998. It also provides a detailed look at household spending on health care in 1998. DATA SOURCES Data on household spending are from Statistics Canada's Family Expenditure Survey for survey years between 1978 and 1996, and from the annual Survey of Household Spending for 1997 and 1998. ANALYTICAL...

In this paper I show that, in economies characterized by tax evasion and endogeneity of government spending, the qualitative characterization of the optimal factor income taxes depends on both these factors. In particular, the well known Chamley Judd result that, in the long run, tax rates on capital income should be zero is, in many cases, overturned. It is shown that the nature of tax evasion...

Health expenditures as a share of GDP in the United States have more than tripled over the past half-century. A common conjecture is that this is a consequence of rising income. We investigate this hypothesis by instrumenting for local area income with time series variation in oil prices interacted with local oil reserves. This strategy enables us to capture both partial equilibrium and local g...

Health expenditures as a share of GDP in the United States have more than tripled over the past half-century. A common conjecture is that this is a consequence of rising income. We investigate this hypothesis by instrumenting for local area income with time series variation in oil prices interacted with local oil reserves. This strategy enables us to capture both partial equilibrium and local g...

Drawing on the 1998 China national health services survey data, this study estimated the poverty impact of two smoking-related expenses: excessive medical spending attributable to smoking and direct spending on cigarettes. The excessive medical spending attributable to smoking is estimated using a regression model of medical expenditure with smoking status (current smoker, former smoker, never ...

The paper by Jakovljevic and Getzen highlighted the fact that low-and middle-income countries have been grabbing an ever larger share of global health spending over the last couple of decades (1). Share of global health spending of low-and middle-income countries as of 1995 expressed in million current PPP international $US grew from 26. and Vietnam) with a joint contribution to the global tota...

ANN C. FOSTER and CRAIG J. KREISLER T he National Health Care Expenditure Accounts (NHEA), the official estimates of total health care spending in the United States, show that in 2008, U.S. health care spending by business, governments, and households was $2.3 trillion, or $7,681 per person. The NHEA also shows that in 2008 health care spending was 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GD...

To provide benchmarks for evaluating the costs of alternative proposals to provide insurance coverage for the uninsured, this study presents two sets of cost estimates derived from medical spending patterns of lower- or middle-income people with private insurance plans and those of people with public insurance coverage during 1996-1998. The analysis suggests that the uninsured would use dollar ...

This analysis uses data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and other sources to compare health care spending, supply, utilization, prices, and quality in 13 industrialized countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The U.S. spends far more on heal...