There is a body of literature by Canadian and international academics examining the determinants of health care expenditures, thereby offering suggestions regarding what variables can be influenced to reduce the health care expenditures. One Canadian researcher, Livio Di Matteo, did many studies on the determinants of Canadian health care expenditures. In Livio Di Matteo and Rosanna Di Matteo (1998), they used a pooled time-series cross-section model and provincial data over the period 1965-1991 to examine the determinants of real per capita provincial government health expenditure, finding that the real per capita provincial government health expenditures were positively and significantly affected by real provincial per capita income, the …show more content…
In addition, the proportion of provincial GDP devoted to health care had a positive and significant effect, whereas the EPF variable was statistically insignificant at 5 percent level, and another regime change, the onset of Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST) in 1996, had a positive and significant effect on real per capita provincial public homecare expenditures. In Livio Di Matteo and Paul Grootendorst (2002), they estimated the socioeconomic and demographic determinants of real per capita government drug expenditure over the period 1975-2000. This time, besides a vector of common demographic and economic variables, they also added policy variables, which aimed to capture the effects of the adaptation of universal drug plans and provincial drug co-payment plans on the public spending on drugs; and year indicator variables, which could represent the impact of pertinent federal policies, including the limitation of the compulsory licensing, the extension of the patent term in 1987 and the elimination of compulsory licensing in …show more content…
In Livio Di Matteo (2000), he used the public sector health care expenditure share relative to total health care expenditures to denote the market decentralization in health care, thereby examining the determinants of public-private mix in health care by using OLS over the period 1975-1996.What he found was that if the reactions of public and private health expenditures to an independent variable differ, then there would be an impact on the centralization ratio. From the regression result, the significant determinants of the public health expenditure centralization for major expenditure categories were real per capita GDP, the federal health transfer, the individual income share of the top quintile which could represent the changes of income distribution, as well as the proportion of senior population and a variety of regime changes, such as the onset of the Canada Health Act, EPF and CHST. Plus, from the significant income share of the top quintile and insignificant bottom quintile, he denied the so called “Epple-Romano hypothesis” that middle-income households preferred higher public health expenditures whereas high and low-income households preferred a reduction. In Livio Di Matteo(2009), he continued the analysis of determinants of the public–private health expenditure