Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

We investigate differences in patients' length of stay between National Health Service (NHS) public hospitals, public treatment centres and private treatment centres that provide elective (non-emergency) hip replacement to publicly-funded patients. We find that private treatment centres and...

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...

This paper examines the determinants of hospital stay intensity, the decision to seek hospital care as a public or private patient and the decision to purchase private hospital insurance. We describe a theoretical model to motivate the simultaneous nature of these decisions. For the empirical...

This paper investigates the effects of removing subsidies for private health insurance on public sector expenditure for hospital care. An econometric framework using simultaneous equation models is developed to analyze the interrelated decisions on the intensity and type of health care use and...

The Affordable Care Act included a provision to eliminate the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap. The policy was phased in by gradually diminishing the gap each year between 2011-2020. This provides a natural experiment to conduct an in-depth study of how the policy affected medication use,...

One of the reasons why regulators are hesitant about permitting price competition in healthcare markets is that it may damage quality when information is poor. Evidence on whether this fear is well-founded is scarce. We provide evidence using a reform that permitted Dutch health insurers and...

We examine the effect of publicly provided health care on welfare by combining local level data on public health care, and individual level data on life satisfaction. It is shown that relatively high expenditures in health care have a positive effect on individuals' life satisfaction in our...