The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure. A new econometric model, the Probit-Poisson-log-normal model with correlated errors, describes the data better than existing count data models. Moreover, it has an...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

This paper reports on a re-evaluation of the German health care reform of 1997. A previous evaluation found a limited effect of a 4.4 percent reduction of the number of doctor visits in a sample of pharmacy customers. The re-evaluation based on a representative household survey, the German...

The paper evaluates the German health care reform of 1997, using the individual number of doctor visits as outcome measure and data from the German Socio- Economic Panel for the years 1995-1999. A number of modified count data models allow to estimate the effect of the reform in different parts...

I consider the problem of evaluating the effect of a health care reform on the demand for doctor visits when the effect is potentially different in different parts of the outcome distribution. Quantile regression is a useful technique for studying such heterogeneous treatment effects. Recent...

We evaluate the demand for long term care (LTC) insurance prospects in a stated preference context, by means of the results of a choice experiment carried out on a representative sample of the Emilia-Romagna population. Choice modelling techniques have not been used yet for studying the demand...

Patent expiration represents a turning point for the brand losing patent protection as bioequivalent generic versions of the drug quickly enter the market at reduced prices. In this paper, we study how physician characteristics and their prescribing decisions impact the competition among...

Health Insurance Marketplaces have received considerable attention for their narrow network health plans. Yet, little is known about consumer tastes for network breadth and how they affect plan selection. I estimate demand for health plans in California's Marketplace, Covered California. Using...

In recent years, consumer choice has become an important element of public policy. One reason is that consumers differ in their tastes and needs, which they can express most easily through their own choices. Elements that strengthen consumer choice feature prominently in the design of public...

The premium rates paid for statutory health insurance in Germany play a key role in the competition among health care funds. With the most recent health care reform (GKV-Wettbewerbsstärkungsgesetz GKV-WSG), a range of new products have been introduced that could erode the advantageous selling...