Hospital heterogeneity is a major issue in defining a reimbursement system. If hospitals are heterogeneous, it is difficult to distinguish which part of the differences in costs is due to cost containment efforts and which part cannot be reduced, because it is due to other unobserved sources of...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...

European health care systems are facing diverse challenges. In health policy, strong primary care is seen as key to deal with these challenges. European countries differ in how strong their primary care systems are. Two groups of traditionally weak primary care systems are distinguished. First a...

The French hospital industry is one example of a market where public, private nonprofit and private for-profit hospitals co-exist in significant proportions. Recently, several administrative reports have shown that in France public and private nonprofit hospitals are more costly than for-profit...

Although the concept of healthcare renunciation is regularly employed in health surveys and increasingly called into the French public debate, it has never been subject to methodological questioning to analyse the term’s underlying significations. If health surveys frequently refer to...

This paper studies the relationship between the diffusion of innovative procedures for the treatment of heart attack and distributions of the cost and length of hospital stays. Using a sample of 5,681 stays observed in French public hospitals, we use microsimulation techniques to highlight...

We study the psycho-social determinants of self-assessed health in order to explain social inequalities in health in France.We use a unique general population survey to assess the respective impact on self-assessed health status of subjective perceptions of social capital, social support, and...

Objectives Since 2006 France experiences an innovative version of Gate-keeping which aims at regulating access to outpatient specialist care. We describe the reform's initial objectives, the political pathway which lead to the implementation of a reshaped reform and discuss the first outcomes...

La France, bien que pourvue d’un système de protection sociale à vocation universelle, connaît des inégalités sociales dans l’accès et l’utilisation des services de santé. L’analyse des déterminants du renoncement aux soins pour raisons financières apporte un nouvel éclairage...