Comparative, dynamic efficiency of national healthcare systems

The paper is an ex post, critical contribution to the research conducted by the World Health Organisation on healthcare financing. The issue of national healthcare systems’ efficiency is addressed, through building a model of change in healthcare quality, in response to changes in healthcare financing, with the core hypothesis stating that the greater is the change in healthcare expenditures, the lesser is their efficiency in terms of healthcare quality improvement. Then, empirical evidence is provided, with econometric research proving the robustness of the model; further, qualitative research provides strong presumptions to a more general thesis, namely that healthcare systems bear significant transaction costs, proportional to their demographically defined size. Thus, important, and negative effects of scale are to assume in healthcare financing.