The Danish hospital sector faces a significant rebuilding program driven by recent regional reform and guidelines for acute admission hospitals. Within the next 5–10 years, the number of public hospitals offering acute admission will be reduced from 35 to approximately 20 larger hospitals. As...

The goal of this study is to present the historical and policy background of the expansion of private health insurance in South Korea in the context of the National Health Insurance (NHI) system, and to provide empirical evidence on whether the increased role of private health insurance may...

From the mid-1990s several countries have introduced elements of regulated competition in healthcare. The aim of this paper is to identify the most important preconditions for achieving efficiency and affordability under regulated competition in healthcare, and to indicate to what extent these...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

Similar to several other countries, the Netherlands implemented market-oriented health care reforms in recent years. Previous studies raised questions on the effects of these reforms on key outcomes such as quality, costs, and prices. The empirical evidence is up to now mixed. This study looked...

We investigate the density of non-contract (private) physicians in a two-tiered health care system, i.e., one with co-existing public and private health care providers. In particular, we analyze how the densities of private and public suppliers of outpatient health care (general practitioners...

I analyze the relationship between health care institutions and the utilization of outpatient services by individuals aged 50 and above. I use cross-sectional micro data from thirteen European countries. I focus on the out-of-pocket costs of health care utilization, the gatekeeper role of...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

Objectives: Medicare Part D is the voluntary program that provides insurance for prescription drugs to 37 million US elderly. This form of public insurance is delivered exclusively through a choice-based private insurance market, where Medicare pays various types of subsidies. The objective of...

Social media (for example Facebook and YouTube) uses online and mobile technologies to allow individuals to participate in, comment on and create user-generated content. Twitter is a widely used social media platform that lets users post short publicly available text-based messages called tweets...