This paper estimates the Baumol effect in health spending, using a panel data set of OECD countries. Health expenditure as a share of GDP rises in most OECD countries. One of the possible causes is the so-called Baumol effect, which may arise if labour productivity in health care grows more...

This document describes the Dutch system of long-term care (LTC) for the elderly. An overview of LTC policy is also given. This document is part of the first stage of the European project ANCIEN (Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations), commissioned by the European Commission under the...

The first purpose of this paper is to give an up to date overview of the literature on health care expenditures. Secondly, this paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating the impact of several factors on health care expenditures in an empirical analysis using an...

This study presents four long-term scenarios for the public sector and health care in the Netherlands. In the two scenarios that stress the importance of collective provisions (Regional Communities and Strong Europe), the share of government production (public administration, defense and...

We examine vertical integration and exclusive vertical restraints in health-care markets where insurers and hospitals bilaterally bargain over contracts. We employ a bargaining model in a concentrated health-care market of two hospitals and two health insurers competing on premiums. Without...

This paper compares the welfare effects of three ways in which health care can be organized: no competition (NC), competition for the market (CfM) and competition on the market (CoM) where the payer offers the optimal contract to providers in each case. We show that CfM is optimal if the payer...

We study the impact of quality on patient volume and hospital choice for cataract treatments. Our dataset covers the period 2006-2011 and includes all 854,613 patients who underwent a cataract treatment in the Netherlands. At the aggregate-level we find that, a one-point quality increase, on a...

We evaluate the introduction of a reimbursement schedule for self-employed mental health care providers in the Netherlands in 2008. The reimbursement schedule follows a discontinuous discrete step function ―once the provider has passed a treatment duration threshold the fee is flat until...

In this paper, the authors study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers.<font face="CMR10" size="3"><font face="CMR10" size="3">First, they find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly...</font></font>

This paper provides an analysis of exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the...