This paper examines the determinants of hospital stay intensity, the decision to seek hospital care as a public or private patient and the decision to purchase private hospital insurance. We describe a theoretical model to motivate the simultaneous nature of these decisions. For the empirical...

We consider how individuals' decisions on their health behaviours depend on the level of investment in their health provided by the State. We develop the model provided by Ehrlich and Becker (1972) and Peltzman (1975) and we show that higher levels of protection provided by the State (either...