Cream skimming is an illegal behaviour that consists in choosing to treat patients according to their ability to recover. It arises from the use of prospective payment schemes in an asymmetry of information framework. In this context in fact the provider can observe some relevant information...

Health care usually represents a so called merit good, i.e. a good whose consumption should be promoted and given that in most cases it might be essential to restore health or to stop its decay, most countries have implemented a public health care system where care is supplied to anybody needing...

In Italy, a substantial proportion of health care is financed by the public sector; our history of high deficit and debt means that the objective to rationalise and control expenditure has become a priority for any effective government policy. The health care system has been widely reformed and...

The use of prospective payment system in health care has mixed evidences as concerns its effectiveness. On the one side it avoid the problem of misreporting cost, but has the downside effect that, if hospitals might choose which patients to treat, competition might become unfair and the whole...

Internal markets have been created in an attempt to shift power from producers to consumers in a context where consumers have very weak incentives to seek out low-cost producers and have little knowledge about the quality of health care. The idea is that by establishing public agencies to act as...

The cost for hospital care depends on the quality of the service, on the personal characteristics of the patient, on the effort of the medical staff, and information asymmetry. In this article the cost minimising properties of alternative hospital care reimbursement systems will be discussed in...

We study the welfare properties of direct restrictions based on cost-effectiveness against indirect methods represented by waiting lists in a public health care system. Health care is supplied for free, but with some restrictions by the public health sector. Patients can choose to address their...

In this article, we analyse the optimal investment decision in a new health care technology of a representative hospital that maximises its surplus in an uncertain environment. The new technology allows the hospital to increase the quality level of the care provided, but the investment is...

In this article, we analyse the optimal investment decision in a new health care technology of a representative hospital that maximises its surplus in an uncertain environment. The new technology allows the hospital to increase the quality level of the care provided, but the investment is...

This paper analyses the decision to invest in quality by a hospital in an environment where doctors are devoted workers, i.e. they care for specific aspects of the output they produce. We assume that quality is the result of both an investment in new technology and the effort of the medical...