The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has been at the epicenter of public discussions due to its possibly adverse effects on the domestic regulation of public services. While the GATS has an admittedly broad scope, its ‘bite’ largely depends on commitments undertaken by WTO...

As the healthcare sector grows in significance due to social and technical developments the EU competition rules are likely to be more frequently applied to healthcare both as a result of the broad interpretation of the concept of undertaking and because the applicable antitrust rules are since...

Whereas the EU's internal market rules govern market access and public intervention, its competition rules are concerned with the market conduct of private parties. When do the competition rules apply to healthcare? In principle the scope for application of the competition rules to the...

We analyze health care option demand markets with vertical restraints divided along two dimensions: naked and conditional exclusion, and vertical integration; applicable to the upstream, the downstream, and both markets. Our unified framework includes forward and backward integration, and joint...

This paper compares the welfare effects of three ways in which health care can be organized: no competition (NC), competition for the market (CfM) and competition on the market (CoM) where the payer offers the optimal contract to providers in each case. We argue that each of these can be optimal...

European Union law prohibits direct-to-consumer advertising of medicinal products for human use that are subject to prescription. However, EU law does not clarify the borderline between advertising and provision of non-promotional information on medicines, the latter being not as yet regulated...

In the EU harmonisation of healthcare has long been elusive. Article 168 paragraph 7 TFEU even forms a sector-specific subsidiarity clause. Meanwhile the ECJ handed down a series of judgments concerning patients' rights to reimbursement for healthcare consumed in other Member States. An initial...

This paper examines the role of the rights-based review in addressing inequities in access to health care. Focusing on the case of Hungary, the analysis intends to contribute to the debate about factors that bring about/sustain inequalities in health and health care at the public-private...

The Netherlands is an early mover in healthcare liberalisation. It has a dual policy towards competition enforcement in the sector: not only the general competition rules (the prohibitions on cartels and the abuse of dominance, and merger control) but also rules of sector specific competition...

Economic regulation by independent regulatory authorities is justified in a legal sense by theories based on delegation, (partial) ministerial responsibility and judicial review, or more recently on regulatory contracts and stakeholder representation. While none of these models is fully...