Major disparities in the cost of health care have made the pricing of specialist and hospital services a contentious issue in South Africa, particularly in the private sector. To help inform policy debate, this paper profiles selected experiences on the pricing of health services, competition...

This study covers “tapering scale” mechanism in hospital payments, i.e. mechanisms linking unit prices to the volume of services produced. This paper begins with an overview of hospital services and hospital payment methods in OECD countries, focusing more specifically on DRG-based payment....

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the link between health insurance coverage and health care expenditures. We use claims data for over 60 000 adult individuals covered by a major Swiss Health Insurance Fund, followed for up to four years. In the Swiss health insurance system, each...

In this paper, we consider that our experience of time (to come) depends on the emotions we feel when we imagine future pleasant or unpleasant events. A positive emotion such as relief or joy associated with a pleasant event that will happen in the future induces impatience. Impatience, in our...

Many public policies, and especially health policies, are aimed at modifying individual behavior. This is particularly true of anti smoking policies. However, health behavior is highly heterogeneous, and so are individual responses to public policies such as taxes or restriction on use. We...

Recent studies examining the relationship between family income and child health in the UK have produced mixed findings. We re-examine the income gradient in child general health and its evolution with child age in this country, using a very large sample of British children. We find that there...

This paper offers an indirect measure of patient welfare based on whether patients comply with the prescription they receive. Adherence behavior is supposed to reveal patients' subjective valuations of particular therapies. We write a simple theoretical model of patient adherence behavior, that...

This paper provides an analysis of the health insurance and health care consumption. A structural microeconomic model of joint demand for health insurance and health care is developed and estimated using full maximum likelihood method using Swiss insurance claims data for over 60 000 adult...

This paper focuses on the switching behaviour of sickness fund enrolees in the Swiss health insurance system. Even though the new Federal Law on Social Health Insurance (LAMal) was implemented in 1996 to promote competition among health insurers in basic insurance, there still remains large...