One cornerstone of current attempts to reform the German public health care system by introducing private insurance schemes is the assumption that economic incentives play an important role in individual decision-making about using medical help. This hypothesis is examined for the case of demand...

This document provides an overview of the long-term care system, the number and develop-ment of beneficiaries and the long-term care policy in Germany. The report is part of the first stage of the European project ANCIEN (Assessing Needs of Care in European Nations), commissioned by the European...

This paper examines the effects of hospital case volume on quality of care on the example of intact abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) and hip fracture (HIP). We conduct the analysis on patient level with multiple logistic regression analysis. Quality is measured with a binary variable which...

Since the ideologically coloured meaning of the 'welfare state', implying a massive level of redistribution and high government spending in the field of social policy, does not match the reality of a number of today's welfare state systems, especially outside Europe, this article examines the...

Whereas in the United States, managed care (MC) plans have been part of the health care system for quite some time, they are still little known in European systems. In Germany in particular, policy makers would like to see a broad majority of the insured population shift to MC plans, hoping to...

This paper examines the efficiency of the German hospital sector over time and the relative efficiency of public, welfare (both nonprofit) and private (for-profit) hospital sectors using data from the Federal Statistics Office of German hospitals. Efficiency scores were computed using Data...

This paper deals with differences between European countries in the use of long term elderly care. We analyse whether differences between countries in the use of health care hold, even if we take into account demographic and health differences. In the use of health care we distinguish between...

Under existing Executive Orders, agencies are generally required to quantify both benefits and costs, and (to the extent permitted by law) to show that the former justify the latter. But when agencies lack relevant information, they cannot quantify certain benefits. If this is so, how should...

This paper exploits rich SOEP microdata to analyze state-level variation in health care utilization in Germany. Unlike most studies in the field of the Small Area Variation (SAV) literature, our approach allows us to net out a large array of individual-level and state-level factors that may...

This paper evaluates whether health plans in Germany's Social Health Insurance select on an easily observable predictor of risk: geography. To identify plan behavior separately from concurrent demand-side adverse selection, I implement a double-blind audit study in which plans are contacted by...