The opportunity for patient choice in the health care system in CIS countries was created by the partial destruction of the referral system and the development of paid medical services. The data of two population surveys conducted in Russia in 2009 and 2011 show that patient choice of medical...

Empirical evidence on economies of scale in healthcare is mostly based on the cost effects of hospital mergers. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper approaches the economies of scale issue by analysing the break-ups of municipal health centre federations. We use the...

Outsourcing public provision of services tends to lower labor intensity and increase its efficiency. Costs are usually lower, but quality problems can affect services like health care and residential youth care. Consumer choice has stimulated innovation in education, but the picture is ambiguous...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....

Elderly home-owners get institutionalized less often than renters do. We hypothesize that housing tenure itself explains this behavior. Using longitudinal data from a Dutch community sample (N= 2,372) collected between 1992 and 2005, we find a negative effect of housing tenure on the probability...

Important differences in labor market characteristics suggest that men and women physicians may be viewed as imperfect substitutes in the labor market. Concerns about efficiency and cost-cutting, which have led to the adoption of managed care practices, may have (unintentionally) favored female...

We consider an endogenous growth model with Blanchard-Yaari-type overlapping generations that is built around four sectors: final and intermediate goods production, an R&D sector and a health care sector. Health care serves to lower mortality and morbidity, the latter being related to...

Healthcare is a very important, and at the same time difficult element of each state's policy. For many countries, the issue of financing the healthcare system is a delicate matter, while at the same time one of the basic economic and social issues. Nevertheless, decisions concerning the sources...

The medical services market in Poland is financed mainly with funds from national health insurance, yet year by year, an increasing importance of private resources in financing health services can be noticed. Apart from common (national) health insurance, medical care is primarily financed...

This paper describes the properties and components of integrated hospital IT systems, and the correlations of those comprehensive systems with the use of tools supporting financial management of the units. The first part discusses the essence of Integrated IT Systems and attempts to apply the...