Activity-based financing (ABF) was implemented in the Norwegian hospital sector from 1 July 1997. A fraction (30 to 50 per cent) of the block grant from the state to the county councils has been replaced by a matching grant depending upon the number and composition of hospital treatments. As a...

The units found strongly efficient in DEA studies on efficiency can be divided into self-evaluators and active peers, depending on whether the peers are referencing any inefficient units or not. The contribution of the paper starts with subdividing the selfevaluators into interior and exterior...

A central theme in the international debate on genetic testing concerns the extent to which insurance companies should be allowed to use genetic information in their design of insurance contracts. This issue is analysed within a model with the following important feature: A person's well-being...

In this essay a conceptual and theoretical scheme for decentralized integrated health care systems of the northern European kind is developed. With small changes it is also applicable to other countries, e.g. Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Three ideas tie together the scheme: modified fiscal...

We study a health-insurance market where individuals are offered coverage against both medical expenditures and losses in income. Individuals vary in their level of innate ability. If there is private information about the probability of illness and an individual’s innate ability is...

When the list patient system was introduced in Norway in 2001, the population was requested to choose a general practitioner (GP). Prior to the reform they were asked to rank their three most preferred GPs in an entry form. Information from the entry form was input for the algorithm1 that...

On June 1, 2001 a reform took place in Norwegian general practice. This implied some advantages of importance to empirical analysis. First, a new organisation and a new payment system were introduced, which makes it possible to perform before-after analysis. Second, the GPs' preferred list-sizes...

We analyze how physicians, medical students, and non-medical students respond to nancial incentives from fee-for-service and capitation. We employ a series of artefactual eld and conventional lab experiments framed in a physician decision-making context. Physicians, participating in the eld, and...

Quality improvements in markets for medical care are key objectives in any Health reform. An important question is whether disclosing physicians’ performance can contribute to achieving these goals. Due to the asymmetric information inherent in medical markets, one may argue that changes in...

In the following paper we estimate the impact of obesity in childhood on health and health service use in England using instrumental variables. We use data on children and adolescents aged 3-18 years old from fifteen rounds of the Health Survey for England (1998-2012), which has measures of...