Premium subsidies have been advocated as an alternative to social health insurance. These subsidies are paid if … expenditure on health insurance exceeds a given share of income. In this paper, we examine whether this approach is superior to … social insurance from a welfare perspective. We show that the results crucially depend on the correlation of health and …

The paper analyzes the comparative effects of alternative health financing mechanisms on economic growth within a two …-of-pocket payment system. A private health insurance system ranks 'in between'. If physical capital relative to health is abundant …, investments in health have stronger growth effects, which points to the relevance of health investments in particular for …