We study whether the information patients have about physician quality when they choose a physician, influences their probability of switching physicians. We also study whether a physician with unfavorable characteristics, as perceived by patients (ex post), can compensate for patient switching...

In Norway specialized health services are provided both by public hospitals and by privately practicing specialists who have a contract with the public sector. Patients’ co-payment is the same irrespective of the type of provider they visit. The ambition of equity in the allocation of medical...

In the Norwegian capitation system each general practitioner (GP) has a personal list of patients. The payment system is a mix of a capitation fee and fee-for-service. From a model of a GP’s decisions we derive the optimal practice profile contingent on whether a GP experiences a shortage of...

In this paper, we compare and analyse the systems for financing long-term care for older people in the Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The three countries share common political traditions of local autonomy and universalism, and these common roots are very apparent when...

We study how market conditions influence referrals of patients by general practitioners (GPs). We set up a model of GP referral for the Norwegian health care system, where a GP receives capitation payment based on the number of patients in his practice, as well as fee-for-service reimbursements....

The literature on supplier inducement suffers from inability to distinguish the effect of better access from the effect of patient shortage. Data from the Norwegian capitation trial in general practice give us an opportunity to make this distinction and hence, study whether service provision by...

We study the interaction between patient shortage and patients' waiting time to get an appointment. From a theoretical model we predict that physicians experiencing a shortage of patients offer their patients a shorter waiting time than their unconstrained colleagues. This happens because a...

This paper presents a medical cost function developed for a screening programme. The medical cost function is a function of advancement both directly and indirectly through survival. We discuss how the medical cost function is affected by screening through a shift in the distribution of cancers...

In health economics, cost-effectiveness is defined as maximized health benefits for a given health budget. When there is a private alternative to public treatments, care must be taken when using costeffectiveness analysis to decide what types of treatments should be included in the public...

Typically, the participation rate is below 100 per cent. In this paper pecuniary compensation is used to increase the participation rate. In a postal questionnaire to 5,000 people invited to screening for colorectal cancer, those not participating were asked "would you participate if you were...