Objectives Although there is a comprehensive public health insurance system in Belgium, out-of-pocket expenditures can be very high, mainly for inpatients. While a large part of the official price is reimbursed, patients are confronted with increased extra billing (supplements). Therefore, the...

It has been suggested that the unequal coverage of different socio-economic groups by supplemental insurance could be a partial explanation for the inequality in access to health care in many countries. We analyse the situation in Belgium, a country with a very broad coverage in compulsory...

Direct and indirect standardization procedures aim at comparing differences in health or differences in health care expenditures between subgroups of the population after controlling for observable morbidity differences. There is a close analogy between this problem and the issue of risk...

We evaluate the introduction of various forms of antihypertensive treatment in France with a distribution-sensitive cost-benefit analysis. Compared to traditional cost-benefit analysis, we implement distributional weighting based on equivalent incomes, a new concept of individual well-being that...

The aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of individual uncertainty regarding length of life. We have collected original data through a survey performed in 2009 on a representative sample of 3,331 French people aged 18 or more. The survey design recorded several survival probabilities...

Direct and indirect standardization procedures aim at comparing differences in health or in health care expenditures between subgroups of the population after controlling for observable morbidity differences. There is a close analogy between this problem and the issue of risk adjustment in...

Given two linear regression models y1=X1[beta]1+u1 and y2=X2[beta]2+u2 where the response vectors y1 and y2 are unobservable but the sum y=y1+y2 is observable, we study the problem of decomposing y into components and , intended to be close to y1 and y2, respectively. We develop a theory of best...

The main objective of risk adjustment in systems of regulated competition on health insurance markets is the removal of incentives for undesirable risk selection. We introduce a simple conceptual framework to clarify how the definition of acceptable costs and the distinction between legitimate...