Rebate Scheme Research Articles

Private health insurance: the problem child faces adulthood.

Since its election to office in 1996, reform of Private Health Insurance (PHI) has been the most obvious health policy focus of the Howard Government. The reform process has focussed on price, product, promotion, legislation and regulation. It has resulted in one of the largest new Commonwealth health outlays in recent memory. Health insurance funds have emerged as active purchasers of care, not just passive reimbursers of costs. PHI fund reserves have moved from precarious liquidity to healthy surplus. Private hospitals are busier than ever before, but margins are slim. Anecdotally, public hospitals report little benefit to date. Waiting lists have not been reduced, and their budgets are unchanged as a result of the $2 Bn allocated under the 30% Rebate scheme. The paper begins by describing the origins of the PHI reform. Its objectives, policy initiatives, results to date and criticisms are analysed. Criticisms include the actual and opportunity costs. Specific concerns remain as to its effectiveness to date in reducing pressure on public hospitals, and perceived lack of equity for certain client groups. The most significant result is that much of the reform package is here to stay including the expensive and much criticised 30% rebate. Like Medicare before it, the PHI reforms have achieved bipartisan support. The paper concludes by describing future implications for Government, industry, consumers and the medical profession.

Competitiveness and Exemptions From Environmental Taxes in Europe

A number of European countries have introduced a variety of environmental taxes. A common characteristic of their implementation is the inclusion of exemptions and tax relief, in particular for (some sectors of) manufacturing industry. This paper analyses the pattern and motivation of exemptions as they have developed in Western European countries, making clear the difference between the nominal and effective tax rates once the exemptions have been taken into account. The principal motivation for exemptions relates to concern about competitiveness. While particular environmentally-intensive sectors may have some grounds for concern, even these might be able to achieve cost-effective environmental improvements, such that their competitive position is not over-disadvantaged, while for an economy structured like the UK's, an environmental tax plus rebate scheme, sometimes called an ecological tax reform, would be likely to yield benefits in terms of competitiveness. The exemptions usually run counter to the environmental economic logic of using environmental taxes to internalise social costs and give economic signals that are based on the full costs of production, and they are likely to increase the costs of achieving a given level of emission reduction. With little justification for them also on the grounds of competitiveness, it would therefore be undesirable on both economic and environmental grounds for them to remain a feature of the implementation of environmental taxes in the future.

The Efficiency Effects of Removing the Diesel Fuel Rebate Scheme

The diesel fuel rebate scheme which returns most of the excise on diesel fuel used off‐road by agricultural and mineral producers has been debated. Removal could cause three inefficiencies (input choice distortion. deadweight losses on reduced exports, and flowon inefficiencies in domestic processing) and two efficiencies (from reducing other taxes and savings on administrative and compliance costs). Empirical studies suggest high net efficiency costs from removal, but while business input taxes have no place in an efficient taxation structure, a small reduction in the rebate could yield some revenue at a low marginal deadweight loss.

Standing charge rebates Costs and benefits

At the end of 1982 the UK government asked the gas and electricity industries to introduce a scheme for domestic consumers, under which the standing charge would be rebated (if necessary) so that it was no more than the commodity charge for fuel consumed on any one quarterly bill. This article argues that on grounds of economic efficiency and equity a standing charge should be levied; by analysis of Family Expenditure Survey data it examines the effect of the rebate scheme by identifying the household characteristics of those who would receive the subsidy. The authors find no economic justification for the rebate scheme.

Distributional aspects of an energy conserving tax and rebate

Previous work on an energy-conserving well-head tax and rebate has treated consumers as a single, lumped entity. This work investigates energy savings, and, especially, distributional effects over a disaggregated household sector (16 expenditure levels × 7 household sizes × 4 degrees of urbanization). The approach includes the price effects on indirect as well as direct energy consumption. Reduction in energy demand is insensitive to the distribution of the rebate, i.e., it is dominated by interproduct substitution and technology change. Change in a household's real expenditure is, of course, affected by the rebate scheme. A rebate which maintains real expenditures (i.e., allows consumption of the pre-tax market basket) is designed for different households; this is compared with a flat per-capita rebate. This is done for energy taxes of 100, 224 and 400% (base year = 1972–1973), yielding energy savings of about 8, 16 and 20%, respectively.

The revised rate rebate scheme

Abstract This article examines the changes of substance and form introduced into the provision of rate rebates by the Housing Benefits Regulations 1982, with reference to claimants other than those receiving supplementary benefit.'

A model of tax-cum-rebate oil (gasoline) policy

This paper develops a model to analyze the impact of alternative tax-cum-rebate policies currently being discussed as possible means of reducing gasoline consumption. The saving in gasoline from a 30-cent/gallon tax is simulated for four alternative rebate schemes and for a variety of elasticity estimates. The short-run impact is found to be small, while the long-run saving would probably be 3 to 6 % (and may even be as high as 9 %). The choice of rebate plans is shown to be an unimportant consideration in terms of the amount of gasoline consumption. It is also found that there would be no negative impact on the government budget under any of the four rebate schemes.

Public Price Discrimination and Aid to Low Income Groups

Recently considerable attention has been paid in the literature and elsewhere to forms of aid to the poor involving income supplementation. Far less effort has been devoted to the analysis of another form of aid that is extensively used both in this country and elsewhere; that of the public provision of certain goods and services to low income groups at reduced or zero prices. This type of aid can be viewed as a form of price discrimination, with some groups, by virtue of their lower incomes, paying lower prices for certain commodities than other groups. Schemes of this kind are widespread. In Britain the central government and local authorities discriminate in favour of low income groups by lowering the price to them of, inter alia, higher education, via the means tested grants for students programme; housing, via the rent rebate schemes introduced in the 1972 Housing Finance Act; and health care, via the exemptions from prescription, dental and optical charges. There are also a large number of schemes operated by local authorities on a discretionary basis which lower the price to the poor of a wide variety of items: examples include school maintenance and clothing allowances, the provision of meals for the elderly, and free telephones and other equipment for the handicapped. In all, some 43 programmes can be identified as basically schemes for price discriminationi; and even this total excludes some of the more minor schemes operated within the Health Service. (The total was arrived at by subtracting from the list of means-tested benefits provided by Meacher, 1972, Appendix 5, those schemes involving direct income supplementation or tax relief: supplementary benefits, family income supplement and rate rebates.) Nor are they confined to this country: the US food stamp programme, for instance, is designed to lower the price of food to the poor at a cost of $1,522 million to the Federal Government in 1971 (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1972, Table 133). Out of a number of possible questions that could be asked about these programmes, I shall confine myself to those concerning the objectives that such programmes might have and the pricing policies that should be pursued in order to achieve those objectives. In the first section I consider the case of a government departmentfwhich has

Inside Westminster

Post Office considers rebate scheme for code users. CASH INCENTIVES MAY be offered to large business users of Britain's mail services to persuade them to use the postal code system—and perhaps undertake some pre‐sorting of their letters before they go into the post box.