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...

Objective By manipulating patients' critical attitude in a video experiment, we examined whether physicians are more intended to perform defensive acts because of a higher perceived liability risk in Belgium. Methods We assigned 85 practicing gynaecologists/obstetricians and orthopaedists...

Background: Assessing the impact of cost sharing on healthcare utilization is a critical issue in health economics and health policy. It may affect the utilization of different services, but is yet to be well understood. Objective: This paper investigates the effects of reducing cost sharing for...

Understanding socioeconomic inequalities in health care is critical for achieving health equity. The aim of this paper is threefold: 1) to quantify inequality in diabetes health care service utilization; 2) to understand determinants of these inequalities in relation to socio-demographic and...

The threshold approach to medical decision-making, in which treatment decisions are made based on whether the probability of sickness exceeds a predetermined threshold, was introduced by (Pauker and Kassirer, N Engl J Med 293:229-234, 1975) and (Pauker and Kassirer, N Engl J Med 302:1109-1116,...

We analyze a rationale for official authorization of patient dumping in the prospective payment policy framework. We show that when the insurer designs the healthcare payment policy to let hospitals dump high-cost patients, there is a trade-off between the disutility of dumped patients (changes...

Background Previous literature documents the direct and indirect economic costs of obesity, yet none has attempted to quantify the intangible costs of obesity. This study focuses on quantifying the intangible costs of one unit body mass index (BMI) increase and being overweight and obese in...

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...

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...