We study the welfare properties of direct restrictions based on cost-effectiveness against indirect methods represented by waiting lists in a public health care system. Health care is supplied for free, but with some restrictions by the public health sector. Patients can choose to address their...

Health care usually represents a so called merit good, i.e. a good whose consumption should be promoted and given that in most cases it might be essential to restore health or to stop its decay, most countries have implemented a public health care system where care is supplied to anybody needing...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients' right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

In a recent article which appeared in this journal, Hoel and Saeter propose a model showing that welfare may be improved by introducing delay in public health care. In this note we argue that their model may be used as starting point because of their stringent assumptions. We suggest that the...

The use of prospective payment system in health care has mixed evidences as concerns its effectiveness. On the one side it avoid the problem of misreporting cost, but has the downside effect that, if hospitals might choose which patients to treat, competition might become unfair and the whole...

Quantity rationing is widely used by the traditional literature on public health care expenditure determination as a means to justify the coexistence of the private health care sector. However, this artefact is not suitable for a wide range of health care services that have an "all or nothing"...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients' right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

In this paper, the use of delay as a tool to improve income redistribution is examined. We assume that people with the highest opportunity cost of waiting address their demand to the private market; if these, as we assume, are the one at the higher end of the income distribution, they contribute...

In this model we use delay as a tool to improve income redistribution. Delay makes people with the highest opportunity cost of waiting leave the public health care market. If these, as we assume, are the ones at the higher end of the income distribution, they are made to pay twice for health...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients’ right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...