This study examines the socioeconomic status of NSW hospital patients in 1999-2000 and projects likely hospital costs to 2009-10. It draws upon unique patient based datasets from NSW public and private hospitals that include hospital admissions, as well as the associated treatment costs in each of the four years to 1999-2000.

In this paper presented to the Health Outcomes 2003 Conference, the authors examine whether the average cost of treating patients changes in line with variations in their socioeconomic status. Given concerns about ever increasing government health spending and the distributional impact of such spending, this paper aims to improve our understanding of health inequalities in...

Late in 2000 NATSEM was awarded a three-year Australian Research Council Strategic Partnership with Industry Research and Training (SPIRT) grant. Among other things, the grant involves adding an indicator of socioeconomic status to patient-based hospitals administrative datasets for New South Wales over the period 1996-97 to 1999-00, in which expenditures have been allocated to each...

Characteristics of NSW Hospital Users in 1998-99 reports on unique evidence from a combined dataset regarding the socioeconomic, demographic, distributional, health and spatial characteristics of those NSW residents who used NSW private or public hospital services in 1998-99. Questions addressed in the paper include: who benefited most and least that year from government funding to...

This paper focuses on projecting acute care hospital costs for public and private patients, and government expenditure on benefits paid for Medical Benefits Schedule (MBS) items and Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS) items in the context of an ageing population.