The incentive structures produced by different institutional arrangements in health systems are important determinants of their performance, and can explain some of the differences in cross-country performance patterns. This paper proposes an approach and quantitative method to investigate how...

OECD countries face the multiple challenges of rapidly ageing societies with the associated rise in chronic diseases and the ever-present threat from new or evolving communicable diseases. This is within the context of seeking better value for money from the health sector. While a growing body...

The recent final rule on Medicaid managed care establishes the minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) requirement for Medicaid managed care and contains several provisions to strengthen delivery and payment reforms and improve efficiency and quality of care. Accordingly, this research examines the...

Health systems in Western countries are plagued by inefficiency and will likely require a substantial increase in the tax burden as populations age. Patients might also face a gradual decrease in the quality and scope of services. The organisational changes needed to drive costs down and...

Does higher medical spending improve quality of care? We estimate the effect of changes in regulated reimbursement prices for hospitals on multiple dimensions of hospital quality, including mortality outcomes, surgical complications, process quality, and patient satisfaction. We exploit an...

The problem of how to pay the increasingly costly medical bills of retired Americans is rapidly rising as a national priority, not just among policymakers, but also among the general public. As a result, deeper thinking within the health policy community on two broad issues is taking place: How...

There is widespread concern about the quality of care in nursing homes. Based on administrative data of a large health insurance fund, we investigate whether nursing home prices affect relevant quality of care indicators at the resident level. Our results indicate a significantly negative price...

This paper examines the impact of changes in public long-term care spending on the use of public hospitals among the older population in England, and the cost and quality of this care. Mean per-person long-term care spending fell by 31% between 2009/10 and 2017/18 as part of a large austerity...

In 2010-2012 new outpatient service locations were established in poor Hungarian microregions. We exploit this quasi-experiment to estimate the extent of substitution between outpatient and inpatient care. Fixed-effects Poisson models on individual-level panel data for years 2008-2015 show that...