It is well-established that high adherence to HAART is a major determinant of virological and immunological success. Furthermore, psycho-social research has identified a wide range of adherence factors. Our objective was to assess the bi-directional relationship between adherence and response to...

Background. Allostatic load reflects cumulative exposure to stressors throughout lifetime and has been associated with several adverse health outcomes. It is hypothesized that people with low socioeconomic status (SES) are exposed to higher chronic stress and have therefore greater levels of...

De nombreux pays ont introduit des mécanismes concurrentiels en assurance maladie, tout en instaurant une régulation pour éviter la sélection des risques et garantir une solidarité entre malades et bien portants. Le modèle de la " concurrence régulée " est ainsi appliqué pour...

In this paper we investigate the possible presence of switching costs when consumers are offered the opportunity to change their basic health insurance provider. We focus on the specific case of Switzerland which implemented a pure form of competition in basic health insurance markets. We...

This paper offers an indirect measure of patient welfare based on whether patients comply with the prescription they receive. Adherence behavior is supposed to reveal patients' subjective valuations of particular therapies. We write a simple theoretical model of patient adherence behavior, that...

This paper focuses on the switching behaviour of sickness fund enrolees in the Swiss health insurance system. Even though the new Federal Law on Social Health Insurance (LAMal) was implemented in 1996 to promote competition among health insurers in basic insurance, there still remains large...

According to the catastrophic health expenditure methodology a house-hold is in catastrophe if its health out-of-pocket budget share exceeds a critical threshold. We develop a conceptual framework for addressing three questions in relation to this methodology, namely: 1. Can a budget share be...

In this paper, we compare single and joint evaluation (JE) of competing public sector programmes in a contingent valuation exercise. Using survey data aimed at evaluating WTP for cancer interventions (n = 2628), we disantangle two types of effects of JE: informational effects and sequence...