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Health Care Matters: Pharmaceuticals, Obesity and the Quality of Life
Authors: Richard D. Miller, H.E. Frech III
ISBN: 084474194-9
Publisher: AEI Press
For many years, health policy in developed countries has rested on the assumption that health-care consumption does relatively little to produce better health. This new study shows that it is time to rethink this conventional wisdom, in particular for pharmaceutical consumption. In this follow-on to their previous book, The Productivity of Health Care and Pharmaceuticals: An International Comparison, Richard D. Miller, Jr. and H. E. Frech, III extend the analysis to quality of life, disease-specific life expectancy and the impact of obesity. This is possible because of newly available data from the World Health Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on disability-adjusted life expectancy, obesity and disease-specific death rates. Employing a logical econometric model, they focus on eighteen member countries of the OECD. They find that pharmaceutical consumption is even more powerful in improving quality of life than in improving length of life. They find variation by cause of death and by age. For individuals under 70, pharmaceutical consumption lowers circulatory disease mortality, but has little effect on mortality due to either cancer or respiratory disease. At later ages, pharmaceutical consumption generally has a stronger impact.
They estimate how much it would cost to raise life expectancy (or disability-adjusted life expectancy) with increased pharmaceutical consumption. Pharmaceutical consumption turns out to be a relatively cheap way to extend life. For instance, their results indicate that the lifetime cost of extending the life expectancy for forty-year-old Americans by one year is roughly $17,000 for men and $16,000 for women. Since current estimates place the benefit to society of an extra year of life as high as $150,000, this is a bargain. In fact, for all countries the estimates of extending life expectancy by one year through increased drug consumption stood well below this level.
Available from AEI Press
Phone: 800-343-4499
Health Financing for Poor People: Resource Mobilization and Risk Sharing
Editors: Alexander S. Preker, Guy Carrin
ISBN: 0-8213-5525-2
Publisher: World Bank
Most community financing schemes have evolved in the context of severe economic constraints, political instability, and lack of good governance. Usually government taxation capacity is weak, formal mechanisms of social protection for vulnerable populations absent, and government oversight of the informal health sector lacking. In this context of extreme public sector failure, community involvement in the financing of health care provides a critical albeit insufficient first step in the long march towards improved access to health care by the poor and social protection against the cost of illness. Health Financing for Poor People stresses that community financing schemes are no panacea for the problems that low-income countries face in resource mobilization. They should be regarded as a complement to -- not as a substitute for -- strong government involvement in health care financing and risk management related to the cost of illness.
Based on an extensive survey of the literature, the main strengths of community financing schemes are the extent of outreach penetration achieved through community participation, their contribution to financial protection against illness, and increase in access to health care by low-income rural and informal sector workers. Their main weaknesses are the low volume of revenues that can be mobilized from poor communities, the frequent exclusion of the very poorest from participation in such schemes without some form of subsidy, the small size of the risk pool, the limited management capacity that exists in rural and low-income contexts, and their isolation from the more comprehensive benefits that are often available through more formal health financing mechanisms and provider networks. The authors conclude by proposing concrete public policy measures that governments can introduce to strengthen and improve the effectiveness of community involvement in health care financing.
Price: $ 30.00
English 472 pages 7 x 10
To order or review this publication's table of contents, preface, and first chapter go to Health Financing for Poor People