This paper analyses the design of hospital reimbursement in an industry with imperfect competition, scarcity of labour and socially costly government transfers. We find that prospective payment not only increases the quantity of hospital care, but also the quality if quality improvements are...

We compare the distributional consequences of two different waiting times initiatives. The primary focus of Scotland’s recent waiting time reforms has been on reducing maximum waiting times through the imposition of high profile national targets. In Norway, the focus has been on appropriate...

The right to equal treatment, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status and place of resident, is an important principle for several health care systems. A reform of the Norwegian hospital sector may be used as a relevant experiment for investigating whether centralization of...

This paper analyses the impact of economic conditions and access to primary health care on health outcomes in Norway. Total mortality rates, grouped into four causes of death, were used as proxies for health, and the number of general practitioners (GPs) at the municipality level was used as the...

Objective: Targeting hospital treatment at patients with high priority would seem to be a natural policy response to the growing gap between what can be done and what can be financed in the specialist health care sector. The paper examines the distributionalconsequences of this policy. Method:...

In recent years, decentralization of financial and political power has been perceived as a useful means to improve outcomes of the health care sector. Such reforms are often a result of fashion, rather than being based on knowledge of “what works”. If decentralization is the favored strategy...

We present a model of optimal contracting between a purchaser and a provider of health services when quality has two dimensions. We assume that one dimension of quality is veri?able (dimension 1) and one dimension is not verifiable (dimension 2). We show that the power of the incentive scheme...