In this paper we examine the recent change of health care policy reform in the Netherlands, which introduced elements of market competition into the system with the goals of strengthening solidarity, guaranteeing an equitable and cost-efficient health care market, and preserving individuals'...

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...

Health insurances curb price insensitive behavior and moral hazard of insureds through different types of cost-sharing, such as tiered co-payments or reference pricing. This paper evaluates the effect of newly introduced price limits below which drugs are exempt from co-payments on the pricing...

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...

The provisions of EU law that are relevant to health insurance are either competition law and state aid, or public procurement. Which regime is applied depends mainly on the definition of the undertaking. At the same time, the internal market rules are also relevant, notably the non-life...

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...

There are no generally accepted results regarding the objectives, decisions, and economic outcomes of nonprofit organizations, as compared to forprodit or public firms. We posit that this inconclusiveness is due to a too broad definition of nonprofits and that different types of nonprofits...

In countries like the US and the Netherlands health insurance is provided by private firms. These private firms can offer both individual and group contracts. The strategic and welfare implications of such group contracts are not well understood. Using a Dutch data set of about 700 group health...

Contracts between health insurers and providers are private; i.e. not public. By modelling this explicitly, we find the following. Insurers with bigger provider networks, pay higher fee-for-service rates to providers. This makes it more likely that a patient is treated and hence health care costs...