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This paper provides a description of the classification systems used to measure hospital services in selected OECD countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Norway, United Kingdom (England), and the United States. Three classifications are relevant: those on diagnoses; on procedures; and on products. In addition, methods used to measure the cost of hospital services are reviewed.

Social Issues/Migration/Health --- Australia --- Canada --- France --- Germany --- Norway --- United Kingdom --- United States

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The health system in South Africa is unique in many ways. South Africa spends 41.8% of total health expenditures on private voluntary health insurance – more than any OECD country – but only 17% of the population – mostly high income citizens - can afford to purchase private insurance. Given the magnitude of private health expenditures, the activities in the private health care market have an important impact on the functioning of the health care system as a whole. Medical schemes (private health insurance) in South Africa mainly finance care that is predominantly delivered by private providers (i.e., private hospitals, specialists, general practitioners, pharmacies). Therefore, these schemes primarily finance an alternative to seeking care in the public sector and offer services that duplicate those available in the public sector.

Social Issues/Migration/Health --- South Africa

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This paper reports on a project to improve the comparability and availability of private health expenditure under the joint health accounts questionnaire (JHAQ) data collection. The JHAQ is a framework for joint data collection in the area of health expenditure data developed by OECD, Eurostat, and WHO. In particular, the study questions were: How to overcome the inherent tendency for much private health care financing to occur without the generation of linked, reliable, and comprehensive routine data? How to tackle the issue of private providers likely to operate without reporting of routine data to statistical agencies?

Social Issues/Migration/Health

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Health services account for a large and increasing share of production and expenditure in OECD countries but there are also noticeable differences between countries in expenditure per capita. Whether such differences are due to more services consumed in some countries than in others or whether they reflect differences in the price of services is a question of significant policy relevance. Yet, cross-country comparisons of the price of health services are rare and fraught with measurement issues. This paper presents a new set of comparative prices for hospital services in a selection of OECD countries. The data is novel in that it reflects quasi-prices (negotiated or administrative prices or tariffs) of the output of hospital services. Traditionally, prices of outputs have been compared by comparing prices of inputs such as wage rates of medical personnel. The new methodology moves away from the input perspective towards an output perspective. This should allow productivity differences between countries to be captured and paves the way for more meaningful comparisons of the volume of health services provided to consumers in the different countries. One of the key findings of the pilot study is that the price level of hospital services in the United States is more than 60 % above that of the average price level of 12 countries included in the study. Price levels turn out to be significantly below average in Korea, Israel and Slovenia.

Social Issues/Migration/Health