The strategy currently adopted in France to deal with the ever-growing health expenditures is one of freezing compulsory deductions and broadening the scope of complementary insurance, while at the same time reaffirming that such insurance is optional. But individual freedom to take out...

The insurance of risks associated with health represents a major economical and social issue. The coverage of these risks enables health expenditure to be financed, which represent a significant proportion of national wealth in developed countries (11.2 % of GDP in France in 2008 according to...

This paper uses a French reform to evaluate the impacts of price regulation on general practitioners (GP) care provision, fees, and income. This reform has restricted, since 1990, the conditions self-employed GPs have to fulfill to be allowed to over-bill. We exploit 2005 and 2008 Public Health...

From the outset, reform of regional health agencies in France, has been torn between two conflicting approaches: traditional state planning and the more recent New Public Management. In fact, the “Hôpital Patients Santé Territoires” (Hospital Patients Health Territories) bill juxtaposes...

The purpose of this paper is to study hospital costs in the event of introduction of a Prospective Payment System in France. We use a nested three dimensional database (stays-hospitals-years) to identify hospital unobservable heterogeneity and a transitory moral hazard component of cost...

Common sense as health professionals tend to dramatize the conflict between managerial rationality on one side, professional ethics on the other. According to this point of view, budgetary constraints and implementation of new managerial tools are many dangers to the values that health...

In France, physicians, who are paid under a fee-for-service scheme, belong to two “sectors”: in sector 1, overbilling is forbidden whereas it is allowed in sector 2. Given the huge increase in overbilling over the past few years, the French government decided in March 2012 to create a new...

In many areas of health care financing, there is controversy over the sources of cost variability and about the respective roles of inefficiency versus legitimate heterogeneity. This paper proposes a payment system that creates incentives to increase hospital efficiency when hospitals are...