Medical technological progress has been shown to be the main driver of health care costs. A key policy question is whether new treatment options are worth the additional costs. In this paper we assess the causal effect of percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA), a major new heart...

Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are more than twice as high for the...

Using a randomized field experiment, we show that health care specialists cream-skim patients by their expected profitability. In the German two-tier system, outpatient reimbursement rates for both public and private insurance are centrally determined but are more than twice as high for the...

The objectives of this paper are to identify the driving forces of health system performance in Germany as measured by the number of avoidable deaths from ischaemic heart diseases (IHD) and to assess the extent to which health authorities can influence health system performance. We find health...

Healthcare utilization varies widely between regions. Yet, the causes of regional variation are still not well understood, and they can also differ between countries and institutional settings. We exploit patient migration to examine which share of regional variation in ambulatory care use in...

Im Herbst soll im Bundestag eine Reform der GKV verabschiedet werden und zum 1. Januar 2011 in Kraft treten. Philipp Rösler, Bundesgesundheitsminister, unterstreicht, dass die Reform den Einstieg in den Systemwechsel bedeutet: Denn mit der Festschreibung des prozentualen Beitragssatzes und der...

Im Herbst soll im Bundestag eine Reform der GKV verabschiedet werden und zum 1. Januar 2011 in Kraft treten. Philipp Rösler, Bundesgesundheitsminister, unterstreicht, dass die Reform den Einstieg in den Systemwechsel bedeutet: Denn mit der Festschreibung des prozentualen Beitragssatzes und der...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side,...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting income redistribution entirely to the tax system, while confining public health systems to their insurance role. We argue that this reform...