| This thesis investigates various health care policies in a framework that combines heath care financing, health expenditure, and public choice procedure. The health care policies studied include wait times for public health care, subsidy for home care for the elderly, and the public-private mix of health expenditure.;Chapter 2 studies analytically and with simulation the measurement of the net fiscal incidence of a program that subsidizes home care of the elderly, when both individual welfare and family structure matter. The definition of welfare incidence, the comparison of welfare-based incidence with budgetary incidence for non-cooperative and cooperative families, and the calculation of the shifting of program benefits between family members, some of whom may be altruistic, are key issues in the analysis.;Chapter 3 investigates the determinants of the public-private mix in health care expenditure in OECD countries over the 1981-2005 period. Estimating equations are based on an extension of Usher (1977)'s model of the collective decision to socialize private goods. The estimation results verify Usher's theory concerning the roles of incentives to redistribute and the losses from socialization of health care when preferences are diverse. In addition, we find that the general right-left ideological views of citizens play an important role in defining the boundary between public care and private care. Finally, the results indicate that population aging is likely to lead to increased spending on the public health care system rather than to greater relative reliance on private care.;Chapter 1 investigates the determinants of wait times for public health care in a political economy framework. A public-private health system is modeled, where the longer wait for public care is the major difference between the public and private systems. Voters' preferences for health care vary according to their expected morbidity and by income. In the political equilibrium, wait times in the public system depend on demographics and morbidity. But they are independent of the distributions of income and of political influence, which affect only individual tax-transfer rates. |
