Excessive waiting times for elective surgery have been a long-standing concern in many national healthcare systems in the OECD. How do the hospital admission patterns that generate waiting lists affect different patients? What are the hospitals characteristics that determine waiting times? By...

Millions of people in the developing world lack access to curative drugs. Thomas Pogge identifies the cause for this problem in a lack of redistribution across borders. By contrast, this article shows that institutional shortcomings within developing countries are the main issue. The different...

Recent political events have thrust the bulk negotiation of drug prices by Medicare and Medicaid back into the spotlight. Yet, even if politically feasible, there is no clear framework for negotiating prices of new drugs with uncertain target populations - for example, due to imprecise estimates...

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....

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...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients' right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

How do patient and provider incentives affect the provision of long-term care? Our analysis of 551 thousand nursing home stays yields three main insights. First, Medicaid-covered residents prolong their stays instead of transitioning to community-based care due to limited cost-sharing. Second,...

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...

Recent political events have thrust the bulk negotiation of drug prices by Medicare and Medicaid back into the spotlight. Yet, even if politically feasible, there is no clear framework for negotiating prices of new drugs with uncertain target populations — for example, due to imprecise...

Risk adjustment is a common policy for mitigating the effects of adverse selection when government regulation limits insurer ability to rate consumers according to their expected risks. I study the social welfare implications of risk adjustment. I first show theoretically that risk adjustment...