LSE Health, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK.
Int J Equity Health. 2008 May 2;7:12. doi: 10.1186/1475-9276-7-12.
As pharmaceutical expenditure continues to rise, third-party payers in most high-income countries have increasingly shifted the burden of payment for prescription drugs to patients. A large body of literature has examined the relationship between prescription charges and outcomes such as expenditure, use, and health, but few reviews explicitly link cost sharing for prescription drugs to efficiency and equity. This article reviews 173 studies from 15 high-income countries and discusses their implications for important issues sometimes ignored in the literature; in particular, the extent to which prescription charges contain health care costs and enhance efficiency without lowering equity of access to care.
随着医药支出的持续增长，大多数高收入国家的第三方支付方越来越多地将处方药的支付负担转嫁给患者。大量文献研究了处方药收费与支出、使用和健康等结果之间的关系，但很少有综述明确将处方药的成本分担与效率和公平联系起来。本文综述了来自 15 个高收入国家的 173 项研究，并讨论了这些研究对文献中有时被忽视的重要问题的影响；特别是处方药收费在多大程度上包含了医疗保健成本，并且在不降低获得医疗服务的公平性的情况下提高了效率。
