This paper aims (a) to determine whether variations in the hospital costs of appendectomy in EU member states are larger within individual countries or between different countries and (b) to explore causes for variations in costs between hospitals and countries. To do so, hospitalisation costs...

This study investigated the relationship between hospital specialization and technical efficiency using different measures of specialization, including two novel approaches based on patient volumes rather than patient proportions. It was motivated by the observation that most studies to date...

Im Zuge des GKV-Modernisierungsgesetzes wird seit dem 1. 1. 2004 eine sog. Praxisgebühr von 10 Euro pro Quartal für ambulante Arzt- und Zahnarztbesuche erhoben. Neben einem Beitrag zur Konsolidierung der Finanzlage der GKV sollte die Praxisgebühr auch eine Verhaltensänderung der Versicherten...

In response to increasing health expenditures and a high number of physician visits, the German government introduced a copayment for ambulatory care in 2004 for individuals with statutory health insurance (SHI). Because persons with private insurance were exempt from the copayments, this...

We investigated the effects of privatization on hospital efficiency in Germany. To do so, we obtained bootstrapped DEA efficiency scores in the first stage of our analysis and subsequently employed a difference-in-difference matching approach within a panel regression framework. Our findings...

This is the first study to specify a physician practice cost function with practice costs as the unit of analysis. Our study is based on the data of 3,706 physician practices for the years 2006 to 2008. We propose a model using physician practices as the unit of observation and considering the...

This paper analyzes the impact of type of insurance, income, and reason for appointment on waiting time for an appointment and waiting time in the physician's practice in the outpatient sector. Data were obtained from a German patient survey conducted between 2007 and 2009. We differentiated...

In this paper, we propose a methodological approach to measure the relationship between hospital costs and health outcomes. We propose to investigate the relationship for each condition or disease area using patient-level data. We suggest to examine health outcomes as a function of costs and...