Starting with a look at historical funding for the NHS, The King's Fund and the Institute for Fiscal Studies set out three plausible future funding scenarios and their consequences.
In this paper we investigate the size of health differences that exist among men in England and the United States and how those differences vary by Socio-Economic Status (SES) in both countries.
This chapter is part of a volume which addresses the relationship between health and economic status, including why health behaviours vary across populations and how socioeconomic measures correlate with health outcomes.
This paper develops an empirical strategy to estimate whether subsidies to private medical insurance are self-financing in countries where public and private insurance coexist and the latter covers the same treatments as the former.
This Briefing Note looks at the potential for the introduction of a 'fat tax' into the UK in an effort to reduce the growing prevalence of obesity in Britain. This Briefing Note looks at trends in UK obesity and examines evidence on eating habits and exercise in order to see whether trends here can account for what we see happening to obesity. We go on to review some of the key economic reasons behind why we might be concerned about obesity and why we might consider there to be a case for government intervention. We also discuss how food is currently taxed and the various ways in which a 'fat tax' might be introduced, looking at particular issues the government might need to address should it wish to introduce one. We finish by presenting some simple analysis of a hypothetical 'fat tax' in terms of how it might impact differently on the rich and the poor.
This note outlines the preliminary findings of the evaluation of a welfare programme in Colombia, Familias en Accíon. The programme aims to foster nutritional and educational development for the children of poor families in rural and urban communities, and the evaluation will use data collected from treatment and control areas to discover what methods are effective and how they work. In this note, we describe what the data show about the population and what the preliminary findings indicate about the efficacy of the programme.
We produce projections of state and private long-term care expenditure and analyse the distributional impact of state-financed care, through innovative linking of macro- and micro-simulation models.
Many health-care systems allocate funding according to measures of need. The utilisation approach for measuring need rests on the assumptions that use of health care is determined by demand and supply and that need is an important element of demand.
The paper presents two taxonomies for classifying global and transnational health-promoting activities according to three parameters of publicness -non-rivalry of benefits, non-excludability of non-payers and the aggregation technologies.
Since the November 2001 Pre-Budget Report, there has been much speculation surrounding how much the UK spends on health and how much more it would need to spend in order to reach the average level of spending seen across European Union countries. An aspiration to increase UK health spending to the average European level was first made by the Prime Minister in January 2000. In addition, the Labour Party manifesto states that 'over time we will bring UK health spending up to the EU average'. More recently, the Prime Minister has confirmed that he would like to see UK health spending reach the European average by 2005. This short note compares the level of health spending in the UK with that overseas and discusses how much more the UK is likely to need to spend on health if it is to meet the Prime Minister's stated target.
