Health

Funding the National Health Service is now the biggest single thing the government does. So how has health spending has changed over the last 70 years?

The IFS Green Budget 2019, in association with Citi and the Nuffield Foundation, is edited by Carl Emmerson, Christine Farquharson and Paul Johnson, and copy-edited by Judith Payne. The report looks at the issues and challenges facing Chancellor Sajid Javid as he prepares for his first Budget.

Much of lifetime healthcare spending is concentrated at the end of life. This paper uses survey data linked to administrative hospital and mortality records to examine how the pattern of end-of-life hospital inpatient spending varies across different groups within a large public hospital system in England.

Building on early animal studies, 20th-century researchers increasingly explored the fact that early events – ranging from conception to childhood – affect a child’s health trajectory in the long-term. By the 21st century, a wide body of research had emerged, incorporating the original ‘Fetal Origins Hypothesis’ into the ‘Developmental Origins of Health and Disease’.

This paper estimates flexible child health production functions to investigate whether better water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices make nutrition intake more productive for children aged 6-24 months.

Delaying retirement has significant positive effects on the average cognition and physical mobility of women in England, at least in the short run. Exploiting the increase in employment of 60-63 year old women resulting from the increase in the female State Pension Age, we show that working substantially boosts performance on two cognitive tests, particularly for singles.

From lagging well behind most European countries in the early 1990s, the UK is now one of the highest spenders on the under-5s in Europe (OECD, 2014). One of the biggest programmes for this age group is Sure Start. It offers families with children under the age of 5 a ‘one-stop shop’ for childcare and early education, health services, parenting support, and employment advice, with the aim of improving children’s school readiness, health, and social and emotional development.

There is growing interest in preconception health as a crucial period for influencing not only pregnancy outcomes, but also future maternal and child health, and prevention of long-term medical conditions.

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. We find labelling loans is a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments.

We study insurers' use of prescription drug formularies to screen consumers in the ACA Health Insurance exchanges. We begin by showing that exchange risk adjustment and reinsurance succeed in neutralizing selection incentives for most, but not all, consumer types. A minority of consumers, identifiable by demand for particular classes of prescription drugs, are predictably unprofitable. We then show that contract features relating to these drugs are distorted in a manner consistent with multidimensional screening. The empirical findings support a long theoretical literature examining how insurance contracts offered in equilibrium can fail to optimally trade off risk protection and moral hazard.

DynaHEALTH is a research consortium funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 research programme. It was established to help solve the societal challenge of an ageing population and the associated burden of non-communicable diseases related to obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D).

Kann kulturelle Aktivität vor einer Depression im Alter schützen? (Can cultural activity prevent depression in old age? : Answers from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing)