In this paper, we view health insurance as a combined hedge against the two consequences of falling ill: treatment expenditures and loss in income. We discuss how an individual’s ability when healthy affects her decision on whether to buy health insurance with treatment to full recovery if ill...

We study a health-insurance market where individuals are offered coverage against both medical expenditures and losses in income. Individuals vary in their level of innate ability. If there is private information about the probability of illness and an individual’s innate ability is...

We study the interaction between patient shortage and patients' waiting time to get an appointment. From a theoretical model we predict that physicians experiencing a shortage of patients offer their patients a shorter waiting time than their unconstrained colleagues. This happens because a...

In this paper we propose a simple, market based mechanism to set prices in health care markets, namely a system where the patients are auctioned out to the hospitals. Our aim is to characterize principles as to how such an auction should be designed. In the case of elective treatment, health...

Privacy of information is a central concern in the debate about genetic testing. Two types of social inefficiencies may occur when information about prevention and test status is private; genetic testing may not be done when it is socially efficient and genetic testing may be done although it is...

In this article the authors Michael Hoel and Erik Magnus Sæther consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided, and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Private health care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the public health...

Denne rapporten gjengir hovedresultatene fra en spørreundersøkelse foretatt blant privatpraktiserende fysioterapeuter og deres pasienter i Asker og Bærum. Undersøkelsen ble gjort av forskere ved Frischsenteret på oppdrag for Bærum kommune for å sammenligne kvalitet, produktivitet og...

Denne rapporten er motivert utfra dagens behandlingsgaranti ved sykdom, en garanti som ikke er juridisk bindende. Formålet er: <p> å beregne befolkningens betalingsvillighet i form av økt skatt for innføring av en juridisk plikt til å behandle pasienter innen tre måneder, og å undersøke...</p>

In this paper we study individuals' choice of general practitioners (GPs) utilizing revealed preferences data from the introduction of a regular general practitioner scheme in Norway. Having information on relevant travel distances, we compute decision makers' travel costs associated with...

A central theme in the international debate on genetic testing concerns the extent to which insurance companies should be allowed to use genetic information in their design of insurance contracts. This issue is analysed within a model with the following important feature: A person's well-being...