The Ghanaian National Health Insurance Scheme pays providers according to the fee for service payment scheme, a method of payment that is likely to encourage inducement of care. The goal of this paper is to test for the presence of supplier induced demand among patients who received care in...

Background: Physician-induced demand (PID) is an important theory to test given the longstanding controversy surrounding it. Empirical health economists have been challenged to find natural experiments to test the theory because PID is tantamount to strong income effects. The data requirements...

Background: The aim of this study is to estimate the cost of care and treatment for extremely low birth weight (ELBW) neonates admitted to a teaching and referral hospital. This cost estimation project can help health policy makers and planners make decisions and develop plans for perinatal...

The correct definition of the product market and of the geographic market is a prerequisite for assessing market structures in antitrust cases. For hospital markets, both dimensions are controversially discussed in the literature. Using data for the German hospital market we aim at elaborating...

Background: The prospective reimbursement of hospitals through the grouping of patients into a finite number of categories (Diagnosis Related Groups, DRGs), is common to many European countries. However, the specific categories used vary greatly across countries, using different characteristics...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the German diagnosis related groups (G-DRG) cost accounting scheme by assessing its resource allocation at hospital level and its tariff calculation at national level. First, the paper reviews and assesses the three steps in the G-DRG resource allocation...

Background: Eritrean gross national income of Int$610 per capita is lower than the average for Africa (Int$1620) and considerably lower than the global average (Int$6977). It is therefore imperative that the country’s resources, including those specifically allocated to the health sector, are...

Prospective payment arrangements are now the main form of hospital funding in most developed countries. An essential component of such arrangements is the classification system used to differentiate patients according to their expected resource requirements. In this article we describe the...

Excessive waiting times for elective surgery have been a long-standing concern in many national healthcare systems in the OECD. How do the hospital admission patterns that generate waiting lists affect different patients? What are the hospitals characteristics that determine waiting times? By...

This paper examines the extent to which agglomeration of the hospital service industry enhances the productivity of producing health care. Specifically, we use a large set of private insurance claims from the FAIR Health database to show that an increasing spatial concentration of hospital...