What impact do prescription drug charges have on efficiency and equity? Evidence from high-income countries

Gemmill, Marin C., Thomson, Sarah and Mossialos, Elias ORCID: 0000-0001-8664-9297 (2008) What impact do prescription drug charges have on efficiency and equity? Evidence from high-income countries. International Journal for Equity in Health, 7 (12). ISSN 1475-9276

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Abstract

As pharmaceutical expenditure continues to rise, third-party payers in most high-income countries have increasingly shifted the burden of payment for prescription drugs to patients. A large body of literature has examined the relationship between prescription charges and outcomes such as expenditure, use, and health, but few reviews explicitly link cost sharing for prescription drugs to efficiency and equity. This article reviews 173 studies from 15 high-income countries and discusses their implications for important issues sometimes ignored in the literature; in particular, the extent to which prescription charges contain health care costs and enhance efficiency without lowering equity of access to care.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://www.equityhealthj.com/
Additional Information:	© 2008 The Authors; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	LSE Health
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2009 11:59
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2024 07:51
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/23064

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