In Germany, cost-sharing for health care has been used as a financing mechanism since 1923. In this article, the historical development of user charges in Germany since the 1980s is presented in more detail by type of private expenditure, including direct payments, cost-sharing measures, and...

Rising costs in pharmaceutical expenditure have become a major concern for policy makers in Germany over the last years. Therefore the pharmaceutical market in Germany has been increasingly targeted by different kinds of regulations, focussing both on the supply and the demand side, using price,...

This paper studies the politico-economic reasons for the refusal of a proposed compulsory flood insurance scheme in Germany. It provides the rationale for such scheme and outlines the basic features of a market-orientated design. The main reasons for the political down-turn of this proposal were...

In many sectors of the health care system, prices at which providers are reimbursed by payers are not determined by the market mechanism, but rather by a defined administrative process. Depending on the sector, prices are set politically and are negotiated between different actors or are...