Browsing by Author "Stará, Dana"

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    Food prices, taxes, and obesity in Canada and its implications for food taxation
    (Technická Univerzita v Liberci, 2019-03-15) Clark, Stephen J.; Dittrich, Ludwig O.; Law, Stephen M.; Stará, Dana; Barták, Miroslav; Ekonomická fakulta
    An important health financing issue facing Canada and other OECD countries are the health consequences of obesity. Food group prices can be used to estimate the model if one is interested in a reduced form model of the determinants of obesity and nutrient prices should be used if one is interested in estimating a structural model of obesity that is more amenable to interpretation for policy purposes. The goal of the study is to introduce new nutrient price model and shows its superiority of food group model based on Canadian data Using available data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, food group prices, and constructed nutrient indexes, we confirm the superior performance of variations in nutrient prices compared to variations in food group prices to explain variations in the body mass index (BMI) of Canadians. Results for nutrients indicate that taxing fat and carbohydrates and subsidizing protein would reduce BMI. The implicit tax on fat from dairy supply management is one of the only nutrient-targeted taxes in Canada. In the alternate model, few food group price coefficients are statistically significant. We find that a tax on away-from-home food would reduce the BMI of Canadians. Currently, expenditure on restaurant meals is taxed at the federal level and at the provincial level in all provinces except Alberta and Saskatchewan. The proposed model may be also used for future discussion of the food taxation in other countries where food taxation is not used and the special taxation of restaurant food is not introduced.
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    The visit fees and its influence on overalL health expenditureS – the case of the Czech Republic
    (Technical university of Liberec, Czech Republic, 2017-06-15) Clark, J. Stephen; Dittrich, Ludwig O.; Stará, Dana; Barták, Miroslav; Ekonomická fakulta
    The goal of the paper is to develop a simple demand model of health care services that can explain why the demand for health care services, and hence overall expenditures on health care, can rise with the introduction of visit fees based on real data available publicly in the Czech Republic. One of the most common problems with the costs of health care systems around the world is that they tend to increase expenditures at a rate that is greater than the rate of inflation. This has led to the introduction of visit fees by governments and/or public, private health care facilities and other health care providers. These fees are meant to rationalize the use of the health care system and slow the growth of health care expenditures. The Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic introduced from 1. January 2008 visit fees as a way to slow the growth of health care expenditures. On the contrary, total health care expenditures increased after the introduction of visit fees. A model of visits and visit intensity is developed, where visits and visit intensity are substitutes. The model shows that the demand for health care services will increase with an increase in the price of visits when the cross price elasticity of demand for visit intensity outweighs the own price elasticity of visits. The fees were abolished with the exception of fee for emergency room visit from 2015. The introduction of a visit fee is a counterproductive rationing device for health care services if it rations a component of overall health care services with a low own price elasticity of demand without rationing a substitute variable (visit intensity) with a higher cross elasticity of demand. Thus, the introduction of a visit fee may induce a sense of entitlement for further health care services per visit on the part of consumers, leading to an increase in overall health care expenditures.