Healthcare

Public spending on adult social care in England

UK health spending

This is the introduction to a special issue of Fiscal Studies, looking at medical spending around the developed world.

This paper examines health status differences between England and the United States, with an emphasis on the implications of any health disparities for health care cost differences between the two countries.

This paper reviews what is known about socio-economic inequalities in health care in England, with particular attention to inequalities relative to need that may be considered unfair (‘inequities’).

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.

This paper uses administrative National Health Service hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending in England.

This paper studies medical spending in France from three perspectives: concentration, persistence, and evolution before death.

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.

In this paper, we present evidence on the concentration of hospital-based medical spending in Canada.

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).

We document facts about the US population's medical spending using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data set.