International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

The U.S. health production function: evidence from 2001 to 2009
This study estimates the impact of the 2007 financial crisis upon U.S. health as measured by age adjusted death rates. OLS regression results suggest that the average death rate was lower in the post-crisis period than the pre-crisis period. The majority of the average decline in the death rate was a result of the time period and not a result of changes in the values of the underlying explanatory variables. We continue to find this result even adding state fixed effects. Contrary to other research, we find that the unemployment rate has no statistically significant impact on death rates either for the U.S. as a whole or fo...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 18, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Much ado about nothing? The financial impact of physician-owned specialty hospitals
Abstract The U.S. hospital industry has recently witnessed a number of policy changes aimed at aligning hospital payments to costs and these can be traced to significant concerns regarding selection of profitable patients and procedures by physician-owned specialty hospitals. The policy responses to specialty hospitals have alternated between payment system reforms and outright moratoriums on hospital operations including one in the recently enacted Affordable Care Act. A key issue is whether physician-owned specialty hospitals pose financial strain on the larger group of general hospitals through cream-s...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 18, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

A framework for guiding efforts to reward value instead of volume
Abstract The U.S. healthcare system is in the midst of a major shift from fee-for-service to value-based reimbursement models. To date, these new reimbursement models have been focused on quality-contingent bonuses and cost-of-care risk sharing for providers, both of which have yielded only modest success.An analysis of health policy and business strategy literature was performed to identify the mechanisms of how value is rewarded in other industries and to understand the barriers to those mechanisms operating in the healthcare industry. A framework was developed to organize these findings. Rewarding heal...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 7, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Local house prices and mental health
Abstract This paper examines the impact of local (county-level) house prices on individual self-reported mental health using individual level data from the United States Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System between 2005 and 2011. Exploiting a fixed-effects model that relies on within-county variations, relative to the corresponding changes in other counties, I find that while individuals are likely to experience worse self-reported mental health when local house prices decline, this association is most pronounced for individuals who are least likely to be homeowners. This finding is not consistent w...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - October 28, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The effect of health care expenditures on self-rated health status and the Health Utility Index: Evidence from Canada
Abstract Studies of the effect of health care expenditures on health status suggest conflicting evidence of a relationship using data from numerous countries. We use data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey and the Canadian Institute for Health Information to estimate the relationship between per capita provincial health care expenditures and both self-assessed health status and the Health Utility Index. Our sample includes all individuals who were 18 years old or over at the beginning of the survey in 1994. We use random effects ordered probits for self-assessed health status and quantile...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - October 7, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Under regional characteristics of rural China: a clearer view on the performance of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme
The objective of this paper, therefore, was to explore the variation in the determinants of household enrolment and the impact of enrolment on health care utilization and medical expenditures in three large geographic regions in China. A quasi-experiment study was designed based on the panel data of the China Health and Nutrition Survey. The bounding approach was used to conduct a robust check of impact estimation under the assumption of unobserved bias. A major finding is that household income plays no significant role for enrolment, which indicates the equity of program coverage in income terms. However, regional circums...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - September 24, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Medical expenditure in urban China: a quantile regression analysis
Abstract Many countries have been trying to expand their public health insurance coverage in recent years. To achieve two fundamental policy goals—equity in health care utilization and control of health care costs—policymakers need a better understanding of the underlying determinants of individual health care expenditure beyond the results of mean regressions. In this paper, we apply a quantile regression method to investigate the heterogeneous effects of various determinants of medical expenditure in China. Comparing with the average effects, we find that health care expenditures at the upper end of...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - July 24, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The impact of pharmaceutical innovation on premature cancer mortality in Canada, 2000–2011
Abstract The premature cancer mortality rate has been declining in Canada, but there has been considerable variation in the rate of decline across cancer sites. I analyze the effect that pharmaceutical innovation had on premature cancer mortality in Canada during the period 2000–2011, by investigating whether the cancer sites that experienced more pharmaceutical innovation had larger declines in the premature mortality rate, controlling for changes in the incidence rate. Premature mortality before age 75 is significantly inversely related to the cumulative number of drugs registered at least 10 years ea...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - June 26, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Physical activity and time preference
Abstract This paper investigates the link between time preference (whether a person is more present or future oriented) and time spent participating in physical activity. Using data on time spent engaged in physical activity from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 cohort, 2006 wave, where time preference is proxied by the expected share of money saved from a hypothetical $1000 cash prize. I find that time preference is a significant predictor of the amount of time spent participating in both vigorous and light-to-moderate physical activity for women and vigorous physical activity for men. The...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - June 19, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Catastrophic out-of-pocket payments for health and poverty nexus: evidence from Senegal
Abstract Out-of-pocket payments are the primary source through which health expenditure is met in Senegal. However, these payments are financial burdens that lead to impoverishment when they become catastrophic. The purpose of this study is to cast light on the determinants of catastrophic household out-of-pocket health expenditures and to assess their implications on poverty. The 2011 poverty monitoring survey is used in this study. This survey aims to draw poverty profiles and to highlight the socio-economic characteristics of different social groups. In line with the concerns raised by the new Suppleme...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 25, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The financial burden of out of pocket prescription drug expenses in Canada
Abstract Pharmaceutical expenditures account for approximately 15.9 % of total health expenditures in Canada. Unlike hospital and physician services, in which costs are universally covered, most pharmacological therapy does not fall under the umbrella of ‘medically necessary’ services set out by the Canada Health Act, and therefore is funded through a mix of public and private plans. Little is known about the actual financial burden experienced by Canadians from out-of-pocket drug expenditures (OOPDE). This paper examines the burden of OOPDE in Canada. 1.1 % of Canadian households exceed our catastr...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 23, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Do preferences of drinker-drivers differ?
Abstract Why people engage in illegal activities is not well understood. Using data collected for this research from eight cities in four states, this study investigates alternative explanations as to why people drive while intoxicated (DWI). We find that preferences and subjective beliefs about arrest/incarceration of persons who drink and drive do differ systematically from others in terms of benefits and costs of drink and driving, and in their risk tolerance. While most findings imply that DWI is a deliberate choice, we do find that drinker drivers tend to be more impulsive and lack self-control in th...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 22, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The demand for health care workers post-ACA
Abstract Concern abounds about whether the health care workforce is sufficient to meet changing demands spurred by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We project that by 2022 the health care industry needs three to four million additional workers, forty percent of which is related to demand growth under the ACA. We project faster job growth in the ambulatory care sector, especially in home health care. Given the current profile, we expect that the future health care workforce will be increasingly female, young, racially/ethnically diverse, not US-born, at or below the poverty level and at a low level of educat...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 6, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Public reporting and the evolution of diabetes quality
Abstract We address three questions related to public reports of diabetes quality. First, does clinic quality evolve over time? Second, does the quality of reporting clinics converge to a common standard? Third, how persistent are provider quality rankings across time? Since current methods of public reporting rely on historic data, measures of clinic quality are most informative if relative clinic performance is persistent across time. We use data from the Minnesota Community Measurement spanning 2007–2012. We employ seemingly-unrelated regression to measure quality improvement conditional upon cohort ...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 6, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Editorial: Relaunch of the journal
(Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics)
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - February 19, 2015 Category: Health Management Source Type: research