We report an empirical analysis of the responses of the supply and demand for secondary care to waiting list size and waiting times. Whereas previous empirical analyses have used data aggregated to area level, our analysis is novel in that it focuses on the supply responses of a single hospital...

We consider an economy where most of the health care is publicly provided,and where there is waiting time for several types of treatments. Privatehealth care without waiting time is an option for the patients in the publichealth queue. We show that although patients with low waiting costs...

Upcoding in Medicare has been a topic of interest to economists and policy makers for nearly 40 years. While upcoding is generally understood as "billing for services at higher level of complexity than the service actually pro- vided or documented," it has a wide range of definitions within the...

In several countries, healthcare services are provided by public and/or private subjects, and they are reimbursed by the Government, on the basis of regulated prices. Thus, providers take prices as given and compete on quality to attract patients. In some countries, regulated prices differ...

Defining the welfare state is not a simpleminded task. Actually, there are numerous definitions which try to reflect at least some of the basic characteristics of the welfare state or its objectives and its functions. For some, there is primarily an institutional parameter, for others there are...

We investigate the effect of reputational motivation on output in a scenario of overprovision of medical treatment. We assume that physicians differ in their degree of altruism, enjoy being perceived as good but dislike being perceived as greedy. We show that better reputational motivation...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and...

Suppliers who are better informed than purchasers, such as physicians treating insured patients, often have discretion over what to provide. This paper shows how, when the purchaser observes what is supplied but can observe neither recipient type nor the actual cost incurred, optimal provision...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high-benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

Evidence on how digital technologies, such as online health information platforms, affect the doctor-patient relationship in general, and the diagnosis and treatment of patients in particular, is still limited. In this study, we explore the effects of alternative information from an online...