Where the provision of healthcare services involves undertakings (entities engaged in the provision of goods and/or services on a market) these are subject to the EU state aid rules. State aid questions are raised in particular regarding the compensation for public service provision, which may...

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...

Using a newly constructed dataset on German hospitals, which includes 24 process and outcome indicators of clinical quality, we test whether quality has increased in various clinical areas since the introduction of mandatory quality reports and the online publication of part of the collected...

This study examines the impact of competition on hospital quality. Our panel covers all Dutch hospitals in the period 2004–2008, in which the transparency of hospital quality information increased substantially. The paper contributes to the existing literature by including both outcome and...

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...

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...