PRM38 Estimation of a Markov Chain for Crohn's Disease and Classification of Patients Into Disease Phenotypes, in Eight Countries Using Individual Longitudinal Data Aggregated Over Time

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Making Gerontocracy Work: Population Aging and the Generosity of Public Long-term Care

This paper examines how the aging population affects the generosity of public long-term care (LTC) in Sweden. Theoretically, aging has a direct effect on LTC policy because the elderly become a more important voter group. However, concerns for other citizens may dampen the political importance of the elderly. Fixed effects regressions on municipality-level panel data for 1999-2007 suggest that LTC generosity slightly decreases in response to an aging population. In particular, a smaller share of the elderly become entitled to LTC

Are there geographical variations in the psychological cost of unemployment in South Africa?

Are certain groups of unemployed individuals hurt less by unemployment than others? This paper is an attempt to test the hypothesis that non-pecuniary costs of unemployment may vary between societies with different unemployment rates. Using cross-sectional data from the SALDRU93 survey, I show that households’ perceptions of life satisfaction are inversely related to household unemployment for South Africa as to be expected in richer countries. Reported well-being levels are shown to be associated negatively with others’ unemployment at the geographical cluster level for the employed. However, unemployment appears to hurt less for the household if unemployment rates in the local labour market are high

The determinants of health expenditures in Taiwan: modeling and forecasting using time series analysis

[[abstract]]In this study, the determinants of per capita health expenditures in Taiwan are investigated. Per capita health expenditures over the period from March 1996 to December 2006 are examined using autoregressive (AR) model in order to analyze whether prior health expenditures can explain current health expenditures. In particular, we examine the effects of both supply-and demand-side incentive mechanisms, i.e., the global budget payment system and the co-payment system, on health expenditures. We find the key determinants of Taiwan’s per capita health expenditures are the prior one month health expenditures, bed supply per capita, real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and standardized mortality ratio (SMR). In addition, we also verified that the new copayment system could reduce health expenditures effectively. The ageing of population, which usually believed to influence health expenditures, is found to be non-significant. Moreover, the global budget payment system seemed to have an insignificant effect on controlling over utilization of medical resources

The redistributive effect of health care finance in twelve OECD countries.

The OECD countries finance their health care through a mixture of taxes, social insurance contributions, private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments. The various payment sources have very different implications for both vertical and horizontal equity and on redistributive effect which is a function of both. This paper presents results on the income redistribution consequences of the health care financing mixes adopted in twelve OECD countries by decomposing the overall income redistributive effect into a progressivity, horizontal inequity and reranking component. The general finding of this study is that the vertical effect is much more important than horizontal inequity and reranking in determining the overall redistributive effect but that their relative importance varies by source of payment. Public finance sources tend to have small positive redistributive effects and less differential treatment while private financing sources generally have (larger) negative redistributive effects which are to a substantial degree caused by differential treatment