We study the effects of "balance billing", i.e., allowing physicians to charge a fee from patients in addition to the fee paid by Medicare. First, we show that on pure efficiency grounds the optimal Medicare fee under balance billing is zero. An active Medicare policy thus can only be justified...

Background: We analysed the impact of clinical study design for oncological pharmaceuticals on the subsequent price negotiations after early benefit assessment between pharmaceutical companies and the German National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds. The analysis was conducted for...

In the early 2000s, Arizona, Maine, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Vermont expanded Medicaid to cover more low-income individuals, primarily childless adults. This change provides the researcher with an opportunity to analyze the effects of these expansions on labor supply and welfare...

Background: This contribution seeks to measure preferences for health insurance in Germany and the Netherlands, using two Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE). Since the Dutch DCE was carried out right after the 2006 health reform, which made citizens explicitly choose a health insurance contract,...

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...

Background: The regional availability of specialized physicians is an important aspect in healthcare of patients with IBD. The association between physician density and healthcare is not yet clear. Most studies did not consider district type, which reflects population density. Our research...

Background: We propose using neighborhood characteristics as demand-related morbidity adjusters to improve prediction models such as the risk equalization model. Results: Since the neighborhood has no explicit ‘place’ in healthcare demand models, we have developed the “Neighborhood and...

Although personalized medicine is becoming the new paradigm to manage some diseases, the economics of personalized medicine have only focused on assessing the efficiency of specific treatments, lacking a theoretical framework analyzing the interactions between pharmaceutical firms and healthcare...

Since 2000 several papers have examined the efficiency of healthcare delivery systems worldwide. These papers have extended the literature using drastically different input and output combinations from one another, with little theoretical or empirical support backing these specifications. Issues...

Despite increasing popularity, quality improvement programs (QIP) have had modest and variable impacts on enhancing the quality of physician practice. We investigate the heterogeneity of physicians’ preferences as a potential explanation of these mixed results in France, where the national...