This paper compares health care systems. It looks beyond normal academic, political, or journalistic rhetoric, by exactly sticking to facts, i.e. empirical data (in particular data provided by the WHO) and comprehensive case study analyses. The paper finds that a number of myths and common...

I give a brief summary of the institutional details of the U.S. healthcare sector with a special emphasis on healthcare finance. In addition to its large size, U.S. healthcare has four unique features that can be used to help answer corporate finance questions: segmented markets, variation in...

This paper presents the analysis results of existing practices of out-of-pocket payments in the Russian post-Semashko health care system. It was carried out based on the data reflected in the ‘Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey' from 1991-2012 and data of the ‘Georating' survey carried...

In this article, I describe my approach to dealing with the challenges and opportunities of synchronous online teaching during the Fall semester of 2020 in the specific context of a 90-student graduate course in healthcare finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Germany’s healthcare system is praised as one of the best in the world. In this article, we review Germany’s health system by critically analysing its structure, funding, resource allocation, provider payments, efficiency, health outcomes, and access. Whilst health provision and access are...

The paper surveys the economics literature on equity in health care financing and delivery. The focus is, for the most part, on empirical work, especially that involving international and temporal comparisons. There is, however, some discussion of the concept and definition of equity. The...

Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) have been controversially debated as an alternative healthcare financing mechanism since the 1970s. Only a few countries adopted MSAs (to different extents) within their healthcare system, e.g. Singapore, China, South Africa, and the US. Proponents argue that MSAs...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

Greece went into recession in 2009, after a decade of flourishing economic growth fluctuating annually around 4 percent; over the same period the average growth for the Eu-27 was just about 2 percent. The economic downturn had a series of adverse effects on the economy and the health sector....

From 2004 to 2012, the German social health insurance levied a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. We develop a new model for estimating the effect of such a co-payment on the individual number of visits per quarter. The model allows for a one time increase in the...