In many public health care systems treatment is rationed by waiting time. We examine the optimal allocation of a .xed supply of a treatment between di¤erent groups of patients. Even in the absence of any distributional aims welfare is increased by third degree waiting time discrimination....

The optimal allocation of a public health care budget across treatments must take account of the way in which care is rationed within treatments since this will affect their marginal value. We investigate the optimal allocation rules for health care systems where user charges are fixed and care...

We examine (a) the effect of market structure on the level of mortality for AMI, hip fracture, and stroke between 2002/3 and 2010/11 and (b) whether this effect changed after the introduction of Choice policy in 2006 which gave patients the right to a wider choice of hospital. For AMI and hip...

Provider competition is a currently popular healthcare reform model. A necessary condition for greater competition to improve quality is that providers will face higher demand if they improve their quality. We test this crucial assumption in an important part of the health care market using data...

Prices for consultations with General Practitioners (GPs) in Australia are unregulated, and patients pay the difference between the price set by the GP and a fixed reimbursement from the national taxfunded Medicare insurance scheme. We construct a Vickrey-Salop model of GP price and quality...

We examine how public sector third-party purchasers and hospitals negotiate quality targets when a fixed proportion of hospital revenue is required to be linked to quality. We develop a bargaining model linking the number of quality targets to purchaser and hospital characteristics. Using data...

Prices for consultations with General Practitioners (GPs) in Australia are unregulated, and patients pay the difference between the price set by the GP and a fixed reimbursement from the national tax-funded Medicare insurance scheme. We construct a Vickrey-Salop model of GP price and quality...

Rationing by waiting time is commonly used in health care systems with zero or low money prices. Some systems prioritise particular types of patient and offer them lower waiting times. We investigate whether prioritisation is welfare improving when the benefit from treatment is the sum of two...

We examine the implications of policies to improve information about the qualities of profit seeking duopoly hospitals which face the same regulated price and compete on quality. We show that if the hospital costs of quality are similar then better information increases the quality of both...

Waiting times are commonly used in the health sector to ration demand. We show that when money charges (coinsurance rates) are optimally set and there are no redistributional considerations, it is never optimal to have a positive waiting time if the marginal cost of waiting is higher for...