Reducing the impact of insurance market failures with regulations such as community-rated premiums, standardized benefit packages and open enrolment, yield limited impact because they create room for selection bias. The Colombian social health insurance system started a market approach in 1993...

Is President Obama’s health-care law dead? Ever since the United States Supreme Court heard arguments about its constitutionality in late March, speculation has been rife that, at a minimum, the Justices will strike down the individual mandate. The predictions rest on a single assertion: that...

In spite of the large expected costs of needing long-term care, only 10-12 percent of the elderly population has private insurance coverage. Medicaid, which provides means-tested public assistance and pays for almost half of long-term care costs, spends more than $100 billion annually on...

In this paper, we explore the role patient incentives play in slowing healthcare spending growth. Evidence suggests that while patients do indeed respond to financial incentives, cost-sharing does not uniformly improve value; rather, cost-sharing provisions must be deliberately structured and...

We estimate an insurer-specific preference function which rationalizes hospital referrals for privately insured births in California. The function is additively separable in: a hospital price paid by the insurer, the distance traveled, and plan- and severity-specific hospital fixed effects...

In spite of the large expected costs of needing long-term care, only 10–12% of the elderly population has private insurance coverage. Medicaid, which provides means-tested public assistance and pays for almost half of long-term care costs, spends more than $100billion annually on long-term...

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to...

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to...

The shares of the public sector in health insurance provision varies enormously from country to country. It is larger in more redistributive countries. We provide a possible theoretical explanation for these facts: a public health insurance system, financed by taxes, can be an efficient means of...

Seit einigen Jahren wird in Deutschland über Veränderungen in der Finanzierungund im Leistungskatalog des Krankenversicherungssystems intensiv diskutiert. Dabeiwerden häufig problematische Anreizstrukturen im Hinblick auf das Verhaltender Versicherten genannt. Insbesondere haben Versicherte...