Public providers have no financial incentive to respect their legal obligation to exempt the poor from user fees. Health Equity Funds (HEFs) aim to make exemptions effective by giving NGOs responsibility for assessing eligibility and compensating providers for lost revenue. We use the geographic...

Medicare continues to implement payment reforms that shift reimbursement from fee-for-service toward episode-based payment, affecting average and marginal payment. We contrast the effects of two reforms for home health agencies. The home health interim payment system in 1997 lowered both types...

This paper investigates the effects of reducing subsidies for private health insurance on public sector expenditure for hospital care. An econometric framework using simultaneous equation models is developed to analyse the interrelated decisions on the intensity and type of health care use and...

We study optimal public health care rationing and private sector price responses. Consumers differ in their wealth and illness severity (defined as treatment cost). Due to a limited budget, some consumers must be rationed. Rationed consumers may purchase from a monopolistic private market. We...

We examine provider responses to the Medicare inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF) prospective payment system (PPS), which simultaneously reduced marginal reimbursement and increased average reimbursement. IRFs could respond to the PPS by changing the number of patients admitted, admitting...

Patients switching physicians involves costs to the patients because of less continuity of care. From a theoretical model we derive that inferior physician quality as perceived by patients, implies patient shortage for the physician and more patients switching physicians. By means of a unique...

We study gatekeeping physicians’ referrals of patients to specialty care. We derive theoretical results when competition in the physician market intensifies. First, due to competitive pressure, physicians refer patients to specialty care more often. Second, physicians earn more by treating...

The HIV epidemic has dramatically decreased labor supply among prime-age adults in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using within-country variation in regional HIV prevalence and a synthetic panel, I find that HIV significantly increases the capital–labor ratio in urban manufacturing firms. The impact of...

Whereas a large literature has shown the importance of early life health for adult socioeconomic outcomes, there is little evidence on the importance of adolescent health. We contribute to the literature by studying the impact of adolescent health status on adult labor market outcomes using a...

Managed Care (MC) is expected to provide health care at a lower cost than conventional provision. Therefore, Switzerland intends to promote MC by forcing health insurers to write MC contracts and introducing budgetary co-responsibility for ambulatory care physicians. A discrete choice experiment...