In many public health care systems treatment is rationed by waiting time. We examine the optimal allocation of a .xed supply of a treatment between di¤erent groups of patients. Even in the absence of any distributional aims welfare is increased by third degree waiting time discrimination....

The optimal allocation of a public health care budget across treatments must take account of the way in which care is rationed within treatments since this will affect their marginal value. We investigate the optimal allocation rules for health care systems where user charges are fixed and care...

Waiting times for elective surgery, like hip replacement, are often referred to as an equitable rationing mechanism in publicly-funded healthcare systems because access to care is not based on socioeconomic status. This study uses patient level administrative data from the Hospital Episode...

Waiting times are commonly used in the health sector to ration demand. We show that when money charges (coinsurance rates) are optimally set and there are no redistributional considerations, it is never optimal to have a positive waiting time if the marginal cost of waiting is higher for...

Waiting-time targets are frequently used by policy makers in the healthcare sector to monitor providers' performance. Such targets are based on the distribution of the patients on the list. We compare and link such distribution with the distribution of waiting time of the patients treated, as...