Background: A dramatic increase in healthcare expenditures is a major health policy concern worldwide. Understanding factors that underlie the growth in healthcare expenditures is essential to assist decision-makers in finding best policies to manage healthcare costs. We aimed to examine the determinants of healthcare spending in Iran over the periods of 1978-2011. Methods: A time series ana...

background: a dramatic increase in healthcare expenditures is a major health policy concern worldwide. understanding factors that underlie the growth in healthcare expenditures is essential to assist decision-makers in finding best policies to manage healthcare costs. we aimed to examine the determinants of healthcare spending in iran over the periods of 1978-2011. methods: a time series analys...

Definitions of "urban" and "rural" developed for general purposes may not reflect the organization and delivery of healthcare. This research used cluster analysis to group Local Health Areas based on the distribution of healthcare spending across service categories. Though total spending was similar, the metropolitan areas of Vancouver and Victoria were identified as distinct from non-metropoli...

While numerous studies assess the impact of healthcare spending on health outcomes, typically reporting multiple estimates of the elasticity of health outcomes (most often measured by a mortality rate or life expectancy) with respect to healthcare spending, the extent to which study attributes influence these elasticity estimates is unclear. Accordingly, we utilize a meta-data set (consisting o...

We compare healthcare spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their healthcare spending. Healthcare spending is 25 percent lower for MA enrollees than for enrollees in traditional Medicare (TM) in the same county with the same risk score. Spending differences between MA and TM...

Healthcare spending varies widely across markets, and previous empirical studies find little evidence that higher spending translates into better health outcomes. The main innovation in this paper exploits this cross-sectional variation in hospital spending in a new way by considering patients who are exposed to healthcare systems not designed for them: patients far from home when a health emer...

The goal of this study was to analyze the trend over time of hospitalizations due to conditions susceptible to primary healthcare (HCSPC), and how it relates to healthcare spending and Family Health Strategy (FHS) coverage in the city of São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil, between 2003 and 2012. This is an ecological, time-trend study. We used secondary data available in the Unified ...

BACKGROUND Prescribing of antidepressants varies widely between European countries despite no evidence of difference in the prevalence of affective disorders. AIMS To investigate associations between the use of antidepressants, country-level spending on healthcare and country-level attitudes towards mental health problems. METHOD We used Eurobarometer 2010, a large general population survey...