We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of general practitioners (GPs). In the secondary care market there are two hospitals choosing quality and specialisation. Patients, who are ex ante uninformed, can...

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...

We analyse – theoretically and empirically – the effect of hospital mergers on waiting times in healthcare markets where prices are fixed. Using a spatial modelling framework where patients choose provider based on travelling distance and waiting times, we show that the effect is...

Background: International studies (e.g. Asplin et al. 2005) show that waiting time for inpatient treatment depends on how the claimed services are financed. In Germany there is an ongoing debate about the assumption that privately insured patients do not only receive more benefits than members...

Background: This short communication report some new results obtained from a medical survey among 900 Vietnamese patients in 2015, looking into possibly influential sociodemographic factors as far as patient satisfaction is concerned, to establish empirical relationships between them for policy...

Decision-making regarding healthcare expenditure hinges heavily on an individual's health status and the certainty about the future. This study uses data on propensity of general health exam (GHE) spending to show that despite the debate on the necessity of GHE, its objective is clear — to...

In the last three decades, many developing and middle-income nations' health care systems have been financed via out-of-pocket payments by individuals. User fees charges, however, may not be the best approach or the most equitable approach to finance and/or reform health services in developing...

A study on over 2000 patients has been conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam, to explore the influences of psychological and socio-economic factors on the evaluation of healthcare quality and public health by patients. The findings suggest effective health communication and the status of being married are...