Health care is neither "a necessity" or "a luxury"; it is "both" since the income elasticity varies with the level of analysis. With insurance, individual income elasticities are typically near zero, while national health expenditure elasticities are commonly greater than 1.0. The debate over whether health care is or is not a luxury good arises primarily from the failure to specify levels of a...

This paper analyzes the implications of municipal budget revenue growth and the monetary policy's inflation rates goals in the availability of public health resources of municipalities. This is a descriptive, exploratory, quantitative, retrospective and longitudinal cross-sectional study covering the period 2002-2011. We analyzed health financing and expenditure variables in the municipalities ...

OBJECTIVE Direct medical cost of diabetes in the U.S. has been estimated to be 2.3 times higher relative to individuals without diabetes. This study examines trends in health care expenditures by expenditure category in U.S. adults with diabetes between 2002 and 2011. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We analyzed 10 years of data representing a weighted population of 189,013,514 U.S. adults aged ≥1...

T otal health expenditure was expected to reach $219.1 billion or $6105 per Canadian in 2015,1 with orthopedic care accounting for approximately 12% of total hospital acute care costs.2 In 2012–13, providing health care in Ontario consumed 42 cents of every tax dollar. Without modification, health spending would account for up to 70 per cent of the provincial budget by 2025.3 In an effort to st...

Medicare expenditures attributable to smoking in 1993 were estimated using a multivariate model that related expenditures to smoking history, health status, and the propensity to have had a smoking-related disease, controlling for sociodemographics, economic variables, and other risk factors. Smoking-attributable Medicare expenditures are presented separately for each State and by type of expen...

BACKGROUND health policy makers in many countries have expressed concern over the pressures that increased numbers of older people will exert on health care costs. Previous studies have shown that, in addition to increasing size of older populations, per capita expenditures have risen disproportionately among the old compared to the middle age groups. Documentation of such trends is essential f...

Nursing home expenditures, along with those of hospitals, have been a target of cost containment efforts because they constitute a growing share of overall public expenditures for health. Of the total $287 billion spent on personal health care in 1982, $27 billion (9.5 percent) was spent on nursing home care (Gibson, Waldo, and Levit, 1983). Nationally, nursing home expenditures increased at a ...

OBJECTIVE To examine medical and mental health care expenditures for large numbers of individuals with diabetes enrolled in employment-sponsored insurance plans. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Health insurance billing data for approximately 1.3 million individuals enrolled in health insurance plans sponsored by 862 large self-insured employers nationwide were used to examine employer expenditure...

This article presents data on health care spending for the United States, covering expenditures for various types of medical services and products and their sources of funding from 1960 to 1995. In 1995, $988.5 billion was spent to purchase health care in the United States, up 5.5 percent from 1994. Growth in spending between 1993 and 1995 was the slowest in more than three decades, primarily b...

Th& article departs &ghtZy from previous ones in the annual series on national heaZth expenditures. Data were fomerly presented for calendar years beginning with 1950. This year the article presents historical data back to 1929, on both a fiscal-year and calendar-year basis. Detailed fiscal-year data by source of funds and type of program are reported regularly in the annual report on sociaZ we...