Introduction Institutional arrangements for health insurance long predate efficacious courses of therapy or even accurate diagnostic techniques. Let health insurance be a type of insurance in which the benefit payment is triggered by an adverse health event. Nowadays the payment is generally intended to pay the costs of health care: physicians and nurses, equipment, drugs
Introduction Historical Analysis of Health Insurance explored several frameworks for understanding the evolution of American thought about health insurance; examined the belief of traditional reformers that health insurance should serve as one of a cluster of measures designed to secure citizens from the risks posed by capitalistic markets; suggested that, in an environment of escalating healthcare
Introduction Given the central role that health insurance plays in the American healthcare systems, it is remarkable how short a time it has been with us. Many Americans alive today were born before modern health insurance became available in the United States around 1930. Although brief, the history of health insurance in the United States
The best known ‘facts’ about the macroeconomics of health are that rich nations are healthier and spend more on medical care than poor nations, but that additional wealth or spending may not add much to life expectancy after some threshold level has been exceeded (Figure 1(a)–(c)). A fact that receives insufficient attention is that any
Health status improvements over the past 400 years have been steady, with a surge over the last century that is nothing short of spectacular, and a period during which economic progress has soared. Vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical advances have contributed to reductions in illness (morbidity) and mortality. Economic growth has shown equally impressive gains
This article presents inference for many commonly used estimators – least squares, generalized linear models, generalized method of moments (GMM), and generalized estimating equations – that are asymptotically normally distributed. Section Inference focuses on Wald confidence intervals and hypothesis tests based on estimator variance matrix estimates that are heteroskedastic-robust and, if relevant, cluster-robust. Section Model
In 1990, development assistance for health (DAH) flowing from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries amounted to only US$4 billon accounted in the index year of 2009. This figure had increased to US$19 billion by 2010, although the year 2009 saw a decline in DAH perhaps due to the economic downturn in
Recent years have seen important shifts in global development assistance for health (DAH). Global health initiatives (GHIs) – consisting of bilateral donor and multilateral programs, and global public–private partnerships – have mobilized significant new financing for health programs, and equate to a considerable proportion of overall overseas development aid (ODA) for health in many low-
Public goods have, for centuries, been part of the economic analysis of government policy at the national level. This has included many goods associated with improving population health, such as water and sanitation. However, in an increasingly globalized world, health is an ever more international phenomenon. Each country’s health affects, and is affected by, events
The first section of this article reviews the risks associated with cross-border trade as well as legal consequences of trade treaties, focusing on World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. It also discusses three features of the WTO agreements, which provide space for addressing the tensions between the economic objectives of trade policy and public health objectives.