We examine vertical integration and exclusive vertical restraints in health-care markets where insurers and hospitals bilaterally bargain over contracts. We employ a bargaining model in a concentrated health-care market of two hospitals and two health insurers competing on premiums. Without...

This paper compares the welfare effects of three ways in which health care can be organized: no competition (NC), competition for the market (CfM) and competition on the market (CoM) where the payer offers the optimal contract to providers in each case. We show that CfM is optimal if the payer...

We study the impact of quality on patient volume and hospital choice for cataract treatments. Our dataset covers the period 2006-2011 and includes all 854,613 patients who underwent a cataract treatment in the Netherlands. At the aggregate-level we find that, a one-point quality increase, on a...

We use a panel data set of about 1.7 million hospital records in 4,000 Dutch zip code regions for the years 2006-2009. We estimate the effect of physician fees and physician density on regional variation in hospital care for nine different treatments. Our results show that a 1 percent increase...

We evaluate the introduction of a reimbursement schedule for self-employed mental health care providers in the Netherlands in 2008. The reimbursement schedule follows a discontinuous discrete step function ―once the provider has passed a treatment duration threshold the fee is flat until...

The aim of this paper is to empirically analyse the responses by general practitioners to promotional activities for pharmaceuticals by pharmaceutical companies. Promotion can be beneficial for society as a means of providing information, but it can also be harmful in the sense that it lowers...

This paper proposes a new method for estimating annual price elasticities from market share data of health insurers. In contrast to traditional methods the elasticity is derived from bilateral price elasticities which relate the net share of switchers between two health insurers not only to...

This study presents four long-term scenarios for the public sector and health care in the Netherlands. In the two scenarios that stress the importance of collective provisions (Regional Communities and Strong Europe), the share of government production (public administration, defense and...

As of 2006, the Dutch healthcare system will be run by regulated competition. An important part of regulated competition is a system of risk adjustment. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the effects of risk adjustment in the Dutch social health insurance system covering the years...

This CPB Discussion Paper presents new estimates for the price elasticity of the residual demand for health insurance. This elasticity measures the loss in market share of a health insurer as a consequence of a unilateral increase in price, assuming other firms keep their prices constant. The...