Healthcare systems differ greatly across the world, however, it appears that the extent of public insurance (publicly/government funded healthcare) is the only institutional characteristic that plays a significant role in accounting for the large disparities in total healthcare spending. Other...

This paper investigates how changes in hospital choice sets affect levels of patient demand for elective hospital care. We exploit a set of reforms in England that opened up the market for publicly-funded patients to private hospitals. Impacts on demand are estimated using variation in distance...

We consider a setting of dual practice, where a physician offers free public treatment and, if allowed, a private treatment for which patients have to pay out of pocket. Private treatment is superior in terms of health outcomes but more costly and time intensive. For the latter reason it...

Reforms to public services have extended consumer choice by allowing for the entry of private providers. The aim is to generate competitive pressure to improve quality when consumers choose between providers. However, for many services new entrants could also affect whether a consumer demands...

Reducing socioeconomic health inequalities is a key goal of most health systems. When care providers are paid prospectively, e.g., by a fixed sum per patient, existing inequalities may be sustained by the incentives to undertreat relatively unhealthy patients. To counter this, prospective...

While European health care systems are mostly public and similar the contrast is large to the US health industry based to a large extent in the market. Using competence bloc theory the industrial potential of Swedish and European health care is assessed and compared with US health industry. To...

Theoretical considerations suggest that nonlinear health care price schedules have heterogeneous effects on health care demand. In this paper, we develop and apply a finite mixture bivariate probit model to analyze whether there are heterogeneous reactions to the introduction of a nonlinear...

The use of prospective payment system in health care has mixed evidences as concerns its effectiveness. On the one side it avoid the problem of misreporting cost, but has the downside effect that, if hospitals might choose which patients to treat, competition might become unfair and the whole...

This paper considers the influence of patients' characteristics on their evaluation of a health system's responsiveness, that is, a system's ability to respond to the legitimate expectations of potential users regarding non-health enhancing aspects of care (Valentine et al. 2003a). Since...