In 1998, national health care expenditures reached $1.1 trillion, an increase of 5.6 percent from the previous year. This marked the fifth consecutive year of spending growth under 6 percent. Underlying the stability of the overall growth, major changes began taking place within the Nation's health care system. Public payers felt the initial effects of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA), and...

We use an OLG model with heterogenous agents where agents can choose between a low deductibleand a high deductible health insurance. In addition, they can save tax free in a health savings account (HSA) if they choose the high deductible insurance. We study the effect of transitioning from a system with private health insurance for young agents and Medicare for old agents to a system with HSAs ...

BACKGROUND Medical spending on psychiatric hospitalization has been reported to impose a tremendous socio-economic burden on many developed countries with public health insurance programmes. However, there has been no in-depth study of the factors affecting psychiatric inpatient medical expenditures and differentiated these factors across different types of public health insurance programmes. I...

BACKGROUND Since 1996, Washington State law has required that private health insurance cover licensed complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) providers. OBJECTIVE To evaluate how insured people used CAM providers and what role this played in healthcare utilization and expenditures. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional analysis of insurance enrollees from western Washington in 2002. METHODS A...

a Department of Health Systems Financing, World Health Organization, 20 avenue Appia, 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. Correspondence to Guy Carrin (e-mail:[email protected]). doi: 10.2471/BLT.07.046664 How health systems are financed largely determines whether people can obtain needed health care and whether they suffer financial hardship as a result of obtaining care. Both design and implementation...

using the optimum control procedure, the present paper is concerned with the effects of trade liberalization on both government and private expenditures in iran. an appropriate analytical consisting of ten equations is specified throgh which significant estimation results are obtained, using econometric method over the 1959-86 period. the model is utilized to explore how any change in control v...

OBJECTIVE To examine health care use and expenditures by Brazilians covered by private health care plans in the last four years of life. METHODS Health plan provider enrollee files and death certificate data were used for 274 health plan beneficiaries who died in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Resources used for a beneficiary in the year of death and in the three years prior to death were identified. ...

health price inflation rate is different from increasing in health expenditures. health expenditures contain both quantity and prices but inflation rate contains prices. this study aimed to determine the factors that affect the inflation rate for health care services (ircpihc) in iran.we used central bank of iran data. we estimated the relationship between the inflation rate and its determinant...

introduction: the success of a health system depends on the accessibility and the quality of health services it provides. one major indicator of service quality is peoples satisfaction from the service. in this article, healthcare availability and satisfaction of people in 17th zone of tehran is investigated. methods: population research center has performed a survey in 17th zone of tehran to i...

Utilization review (UR) has become a prominent approach to cost containment now used by almost 65% of private group insurance plans. Although insurers have increasingly relied on UR to contain health care costs, until recently little was known about the effects of this cost containment approach. This article reviews some of the key findings of a UR evaluation, based on analysis of claims data o...