The economy and post-Brexit uncertainties, rather than public services, was clearly uppermost in the Chancellor’s mind when he announced the Autumn Statement. The Statement, informed by the OBR’s first forecasts since the Referendum, contained mixed news for Wales. This blog post looks at some of the key takeaway messages for Wales.
This paper presents a summary of the trends in medical expenditure in England together with, using detailed administrative data, an analysis of the growth over 15 years of expenditure and activity in hospital inpatient health care, which represents around 20–25 per cent of all NHS expenditure.
Using full population longitudinal data from merged administrative registers for Denmark, we document that medical spending is highly concentrated in the population and is persistent through time at the individual level.
We use claims panel data from a big German private health insurer to provide detailed individual-level evidence on medical spending between 2005 and 2011. This includes evidence on the distribution of medical spending, the dependence of medical spending on age and other demographic characteristics, its persistence, and how medical spending evolves in the years before death.
Health care spending growth in Japan has accelerated in recent years, unlike in most OECD countries. It is thus important to characterise the structure of recent medical spending using individual-level data.
The Netherlands is among the top spenders on health in the OECD. We document the life-cycle profile, concentration and persistence of this expenditure using claims data covering both curative and long-term care expenses for the full Dutch population.
Since the creation of National Health Insurance (NHI) in 1995, Taiwan's medical spending has been increasing rapidly, as has been the case in most countries worldwide. This paper follows international standards in documenting recent trends in Taiwan's medical spending by category, relying on official statistics, Surveys of Family Income and Expenditure (SFIE) data and administrative reimbursement panel data from the NHI Universal Database (NHIUD).
There is little current information regarding the long-term persistence of health spending in the United States, in particular among the population aged under 65 (pre-Medicare eligibility). We describe and model the extent of persistence over a six-year period (2003–08) using medical and pharmacy claims for over 3 million employees, retirees and dependants derived from the Truven Health MarketScan database.
A special issue of Fiscal Studies published today looks at patterns of individual level health spending across a range of countries, and finds some important similarities. It shows how health spending is concentrated in the last years of life, how significantly more is spent on the poor than on the rich and how health spending tends to be concentrated on a relatively small number of people with high needs.
