This paper examines the effect of copayments on doctor visits using the German health care reform of 2004 as a natural experiment. In January 2004, copayments of 10 euros for the first doctor visit in each quarter have been introduced for all adults in the statutory health insurance. Individuals...

High and rapidly rising health care costs in the United States and growing ranks of uninsured persons have brought health care reform to the top of the U.S. Administration`s policy agenda. This paper describes the health care financing system in the United States, highlights what are viewed as...

People deny health risks, invest too little in disease prevention, and are highly sensitive to the price of preventative health care, especially in developing countries. Moreover, private sector R&D spending on developing-country diseases is almost non-existent. To explain these empirical...

Trade in health products has been flourishing in recent years as the demand for better health has been growing throughout the world. At the same time, trade in health products is hampered by substantive trade barriers. In this paper, we present evidence that countries around the world still...

This study summarizes what we know and do not know, in both economic theory and empirical practice, about the potential to more closely approximate competitive markets in healthcare and insurance in ways that will do more good than harm to the current dysfunctional system. The alternatives to...

In public health sectors of many developing countries, patients offer payments to their doctors outside the official payment channels. We argue that the fundamental cause of informal payments is that formal prices cannot fully differentiate patients' various needs. We compare welfare...

We assess the productivity growth of the English and Italian healthcare systems over the period from 2004 to 2011. The English (NHS) and the Italian (SSN) healthcare systems share many similar features, facilitating comparison: basic founding principles, financing, organization, management, and...

The years 2003-2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the rapid rise and demise of the Clinton administration's health reform efforts. Health reform may again be a political issue in the 2008 congressional and presidential elections. However, analysts still disagree over why large-scale health...

The purpose of this research article is to propose a hybrid solution of private and public mixture of health care services to the ever increasing costs of the health care in Iran. That is, the basic health care services to be provided by public health insurance programs and then supplementary...