It is a big challenge to ensure the ambulatory care in economically underdeveloped, rural areas. Some regions of Brandenburg face a shortage of medical care which is primarily caused by the change of generations, the lack of young people and the little existing infrastructure. In these parts of...

In Germany there is an ongoing debate on the adequate distribution of physicians that are obliged to guarantee the overall access to health care. Especially in rural regions the number of general practioners will decline in the next years. From a health economics point of view it has to be...

General practitioner (GP) care in Germany is characterized by a disparate distribution of GPs. There is considerable oversupply in many urban areas while there is undersupply in many rural regions. Centralized planning of GP capacities so far has not been able to ameliorate this unequal...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of general practitioners (GPs). In the secondary care market there are two hospitals choosing quality and specialisation. Patients, who are ex ante uninformed, can...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...

The US and the EU recently introduced regulation to curb the extent of risky off-label drug use. It offers manufacturers a prolongation of patent protection or exclusivity if they invest in pediatric clinical tests. This paper shows that a reinforcement of physician liability for off-label use...

Many health economists demand more competition in the health care system. They focus on the competition between sickness funds for insured and the competition between health care providers for contracts with sickness funds. But they neglect the competition between health care providers for...

A central concern in health economics is to understand the influence of commonly used physician payment systems. We introduce a controlled laboratory experiment to analyze the influence of fee-for-service (FFS) and capitation (CAP) payments on physicians' behaviour. Medical students decide as...

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....