CONTEXT Payers, policy makers, and professional organizations have launched a variety of initiatives aimed at improving hospital quality with inpatient surgery. Despite their obvious benefits for patients, the likely impact of these efforts on health care costs is uncertain. In this context, we examined relationships between hospital outcomes and expenditures in the US Medicare population. ME...

BACKGROUND It has been shown that patients cared for at private for-profit hospitals have higher risk-adjusted mortality rates than those cared for at private not-for-profit hospitals. Uncertainty remains, however, about the economic implications of these forms of health care delivery. Since some policy-makers might still consider for-profit health care if expenditure savings were sufficiently ...

The payment functions of central banks vary among nations. Some central banks provide only limited payment services, such as issuing and redeeming currency and facilitating settlement among members of payments systems by transferring reserve balances.1 In the United States, the Federal Reserve has been a provider of payment services since the early 1900s. By 1918, the Fed had acquired a large s...

INTRODUCTION The free maternal health policy was implemented in Ghana in 2008 under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). The policy sought to eliminate out of pocket (OOP) payments and enhance the utilisation of maternal health services. It is unclear whether the policy had altered OOP payments for services. The study explored views on costs and actual OOP payments during pregnancy. The...

OBJECTIVES Examination of efficiency in health care requires that cost information be normalized. Medicare payments include both geographic and policy-based facility type differentials (e.g., wage index and disproportionate share hospital), which can bias cost comparisons of hospitals and averages across geographic areas. Standardizing payment information to remove the area- and policy-based pa...

By January 2000, approximately one sixth of all Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in HMOs. Medicare payments made on their behalf are projected to total $40 billion for 2000.1 Historically, capitated payments to health plans—currently averaging $5100 per patient—have been based on a percentage of average costs in fee-for-service Medicare. Until now, these payments have been adjusted only for...

BACKGROUND NHS general practice payments in England include pay for performance elements and a weighted component designed to compensate for workload, but without measures of specific deprivation or ethnic groups. AIM To determine whether population factors related to health needs predicted variations in NHS payments to individual general practices in England. DESIGN AND SETTING Cross-secti...

Protecting households from high out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for health care is an important health system goal. High OOP payments can push households into poverty and make them vulnerable to catastrophic health expenditures. This study, based in India, aims to: (a) estimate OOP payments for health and related impoverishment across economic groups; (b) decompose OOP payments and relate the cont...

In December 1991, almost 439,000 blind and disabled children were receiving Supplemental Security Income (%I) payments. These children made up nearly 9 percent of the more than 5 million SSI recipients in December. By comparison, in December 1980, payments were made to almost 229,000 blind and disabled children (about 6 percent of the 4 million SSI recipients in that month) shown in table 1. To...

A dynamically consistent model of equilibrium unemployment when UI payments are duration dependent is developed. The main market distortion is a moral hazard problem: the government does not observe job o¤ers. Hence, UI payments put unemployed workers in a better bargaining position which directly a¤ects equilibrium wage determination. Simulations ...nd that shortening the duration of UI paymen...