This paper examines the competition of nonprofit sickness funds in the market for supplementary health insurance. We investigate product quality strategies when quality is costly and the sickness funds are competing for customers. As long as the sickness funds choose the qualities for...

Usually, health policy makers face a trade-off between benefits and costs from healthcare markets regulation and deregulation. We argue that these markets and policy reforms should not be studied in isolation as the effects from regulation in one market spillover to other markets. In particular,...

We study the relationship between market size and a number of firms in several healthcare professions in Slovakia to provide a new evidence about their entry decisions and a toughness of competition in the market. The size of a local market to support the entry of the first general practitioner...

The relationship between physicians and hospitals has dramatically changed over the last decade, with the employer-employee model supplanting the traditional model of private physicians with hospital admitting privileges. We examine the motivation for this form of vertical integration by...

Vertical integration in the health sector refers to the government structure designed to coordinate and control attention services in the different states of the value chain, and to facilitate the collaboration and communication between the suppliers. In Colombia, the vertical integration allows...

Usually, health policy makers face a trade-off between benefits and costs from healthcare markets regulation and deregulation. We argue that these markets and policy reforms should not be studied in isolation as the effects from regulation in one market spillover to other markets. In particular,...

We study the relationship between market size and a number of firms in several healthcare professions in Slovakia to provide a new evidence about their entry decisions and a toughness of competition in the market. The size of a local market to support the entry of the first general practitioner...

General (or family) practice and its role within primary care is increasingly regarded as the key to achieving efficiency and equity in many health care systems. This is particularly relevant where general practitioners (GPs) act as gatekeepers to specialist care. This chapter outlines the main...

We develop a partial equilibrium, perfectly competitive framework of a (potentially) vertically oriented industry. There are three types of firms: Upstream firms that use primary factors to produce an intermediate; downstream firms that use primary factors and intermediates to produce a final...