Public funding

Public funding for road and highway construction and reconstruction. Federal highway funding alone was 217 billion in 1998. 

True. Illegal drug habits are a major cause of crime (see answer 15 above) which cost UK citizens many millions of pounds annually. The cost to UK health services likewise runs into many millions of pounds, all paid for out of public funds. 

The genomic era continues to transform itself into the proteomic era [126]. A number of entities ranging from pharmaceutical companies to publicly funded... 

This book consists of a series of works that evaluate various aspects related to the public financing of pharmaceuticals. In all health systems with majority public funding, the financing of pharmaceuticals constitutes one of the key factors in reform policies and health cost containment measures. This importance of pharmaceutical spending can be explained by both its relative size (its share within health expenditure as a whole), and its rapid growth, which is closely related to the constant incorporation of therapeutic innovations. 

The credibility of the commitment to maintain and even improve the public funding of medicines in the short and long term renders it necessary to take measures aimed at reducing the imperfection and inequality of users /voters information about the fact that not all pharmaceuticals are equally effective or necessary, and that there is no worse enemy for the public provision of pharmaceuticals (and indeed one s state of health) than the illusion that it is possible to indiscriminately continue to provide any drug to anyone regardless of its effectiveness and cost. 

Over the last two decades, patents have played an increasingly important role in international trade and the protection they afford has been extended. Yet parallel to this, economic research on the impact of patents has been emphasizing that this is only one of the mechanisms for encouraging innovation. Furthermore, the extension of patent protection in publicly funded research is bearing fruit. 

The implications of the differences in pharmaceutical prices between countries can be far-reaching for any health system with public funding. Let us focus our attention on two aspects. The first of these concerns the capacity of price regulation systems to guarantee low prices without causing excessive harm to incentives to innovate. The second concerns the widespread practice of using observed prices in other countries as a reference for the pricing authorization of new pharmaceuticals. 

The purpose of this chapter is to present the main economic characteristics of reference pricing (RP) as a system for the public funding of pharmaceuticals financed by the public sector. The following sections deal with the definition and objectives of RP and analyse the features of the various reference pricing systems that are applied internationally. This is followed by a look at the justification for RP from the economic point of view. We then go on to analyse the impact of RP policies, especially with regard to expenditure, consumption and drag prices. In the final section we discuss what can be expected from the application of RP to the Spanish health system. 

In fiscal year 1995, 1.9 million people were admitted to publicly funded treatment facilities. 

ISO has two important functions in analytical chemistry. The first is to publish descriptions of accepted methods. These are effectively industry standard methods for particular protocols. The second is in laboratory accreditation. For a laboratory to be ISO accredited, compliance with international QA standards must be confirmed by an initial assessment and subsequently from repeated audits by an independent assessor. Since ISO has no legal or regulatory powers, the standards are voluntary. It is unlikely, however, that a forensic analysis which did not conform to an ISO standard would be upheld in court, for example. Most commercial laboratories need to be accredited to remain competitive and to deal with regulatory authorities. Most university labs are not accredited, mainly due to the time and costs involved, and also to the nonroutine nature of much university research. However, university accreditation may become a requirement in the near future, especially for publicly funded research in the UK. The details of laboratory accreditation are discussed by Christie et al. (1999) and Dobb (2004). 

From 1978 through 1990, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drag Administration divided the responsibility for postmarketing surveillance of vaccines in the United States. FDA received reports of adverse events after vaccines were administered in the private sector events occurring after the administration of vaccines purchased with public funds were reported to the Monitoring System for Adverse Events Following Immunization. 

Why is innovation important, and why are so many people interested in it One reason is that accelerating progress over several decades now leads people to ask Whats new What s better What will make us healthier and happier How can we protect our environment and expand our sources of energy How do we maximize the good innovations and minimize or eliminate the bad Are public funds, increasingly devoted to innovation since World War II, being well spent ... 

Under COST 68 bis, five Working Parties were established to co-ordinate the various areas of research. As a Concerted Action , no direct funding was available from the European Commission to finance research projects on sewage sludge, each country being expected to contribute its own publicly-funded projects to the common pool . 

The soil framework directive should be presented by the end of 2005. At the current time it remains uncertain which of the above soil threats will be regulated by the EU and which will be the responsibility of member States. However, the number of regulations is bound to rise. Furthermore, new measures will probably have to be paid for by private owners based on their duty of care. Only orphan sites may attract public funding. 

Perhaps the most important contribution of the Academy committee came in the area of what its report called science policy. The term was not used, as it is typically, to describe issues of, for example, the public funding of scientific research, or the priorities given to various research endeavors. In the context of the committee s report, the phrase was used to describe the considerations to be given to the choice of scientific assumptions that are necessary to complete a risk... 

Academia has been rich in producing theoretical computational methodology that underpins molecular modeling. The following software arose from universities or private and publicly funded institutes AMBER [10], INSIGHT [11,12], CHARMM [13], SYBYL [14], GRID [15], DOCK [16] and HINT (Hydropathic INTeractions) [39]. All except AMBER were commercialized. 

The hxed-dollar public subsidy would apply to existing and to future vaccines. For existing vaccines, a higher price would encourage more entry into the vaccine business, more investment in developing improved versions of existing vaccines, and greater investments in production capacity to reduce the probability of supply disruptions. For future vaccines, injection of public funds coupled with the mandate would increase market sizes and prospective returns to R D on new vaccines. 

To decide on the allocation of public and private resources, some form of cost-effectiveness analysis is used in many countries, large and small (Drummond, Chapter 11). The single most common type of medical care to which this method is applied is the use of pharmaceutical products. Sometimes the decision involves new uses for existing products developed and produced in the country making the decision, and sometimes it involves products imported from abroad. Sometimes as well the decision involves the potential allocation of resources to a new product if brought to market, and often public funds play a role in such innovation. 

Cutler and Kadiyala s (2003) estimates of life expectancy benefits associated with improved cardiovascular treatment suggest a high value of pharmaceutical products relative to costs. An analysis at the national level would provide confirmation that the value of pharmaceuticals is not limited to cardiovascular disease. Here we performed such an analysis for Canada, where the public funding of health care has led to extensive debate over its value and, more specifically, over the value of pharmaceutical products whose rate of growth within the health care budget continues to increase. 

Ironically, while vaccines in general have had difficulty attracting public funding, the threat of bioterrorism following the attack on the United States on September 11,2001, has led to rapid and large-scale increases in funding for vaccines to counter such threats. In the United States, the desire to increase funding led to the implementation of some questionable policies, which are described by Maurer in Chapter 5. 

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