Abstract ; Background: The health care reform of 2004 was intended to reduce moral hazard in the statutory health insurance through various financial incentives. An important element of the reform has been the introduction of a per-quarter fee for doctor visits. The second part of the reform has...

When health insurance reforms involve non-linear price schedules tied to payment periods (for example, a quarter or a year), the empirical analysis of its effects has to take the within-period time structure of incentives into account. The analysis is further complicated when demand data are...

Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...