The troubled financing situation of Germany's statutory health insurance (SHI) is a subject widely debated in the public. A further reform for 2006 is now in the offing, only three years after the Act on the Modernisation of Statutory Health Insurance came into force. So far, though, little...

The troubled financing situation of Germany's statutory health insurance (SHI) is a subject widely debated in the public. A further reform for 2006 is now in the offing, only three years after the Act on the Modernisation of Statutory Health Insurance came into force. So far, though, little...

Health expenditures in Germany - as in almost all industrialized countries - grow more rapidly than the gross domestic product. Since a large portion of German health expenditures is financed by non-voluntary health premiums proportional to personal wages and collected by social health...

Health expenditures in Germany - as in almost all industrialized countries - grow more rapidly than the gross domestic product. Since a large portion of German health expenditures is financed by non-voluntary health premiums proportional to personal wages and collected by social health...

Die Privatisierung von Krankenhäusern, d.h. der Trägerwechsel von kommunalen und privat-freigemeinnützigen hin zu privat-gewinnorientierten Trägern wird seit Beginn dieser Entwicklung Anfang der 1990er Jahre kontrovers diskutiert. Zur Versachlichung der Debatte wurde im Jahr 2009 das...

Die Privatisierung von Krankenhäusern, d.h. der Trägerwechsel von kommunalen und privat-freigemeinnützigen hin zu privat-gewinnorientierten Trägern wird seit Beginn dieser Entwicklung Anfang der 1990er Jahre kontrovers diskutiert. Zur Versachlichung der Debatte wurde im Jahr 2009 das...

This paper examines the sustainability of weight loss achieved through cash rewards and, for the first time, the potential of monetary incentives to prevent weight cycling. In a three period randomized controlled trial, about 700 obese persons were assigned to two treatment groups, which were...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure,and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a...

We analyse the financial performance of small German hospitals based on balance sheet data of about 1,000 hospitals in 2007. Measures of financial performance are the earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) and the probability of default (PD). We find that, on...