Competition plays an ambiguous role in nursing home markets where public and private payers coexist. Using U.S. nursing home data with a wide range of market structures, we find a U-shaped relationship between competition and service quality when nursing homes serve a mix of public and private...

In this paper we concentrate on the question whether the financing structure of the health care systems converges. In a world of increasing economic integration convergence in health care financing (HCF) and, hence, decreasing differences in HCF across countries enhance individuals' (labour)...

After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country's GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times what it...

Der Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung hat in seinem Jahresgutachten 2002/03 erstmals die beiden einnahmeseitigen Reformoptionen des Krankenversicherungssystems Bürgerversicherung und Gesundheitsprämien diskutiert (Sachverständigenrat, 2002, S. 282...

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...

Die Sondierungsgespräche zwischen der Union und der SPD haben die Diskussion über eine Reform der Krankenversicherung wieder auf die Tagesordnung gesetzt. Eine »Bürgerversicherung«, mit der die Trennung von privaten und gesetzlichen Krankenkassen aufgehoben würde, wird es nicht geben. Aber...

Die Gesundheitssysteme stehen weltweit zur Diskussion. Kann internationales Benchmarking ganzer Gesundheitssysteme dazu beitragen, Lösungen für deren Probleme zu finden? Diese Arbeit stellt drei aktuelle Ansätze solcher Vergleiche vor. Hierbei werden die Erkenntnisse ebenso erläutert wie die...

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...

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....

This paper studies the interaction between public and private health care provision in a National Health Service (NHS), with free public care and costly private care. The health authority decides whether or not to allow private provision and sets the public sector remuneration. The physicians...