Although the crisis of health care in the United States is widely acknowledged – marked by poor health outcomes, high costs, unequal access, and widening health inequities – its structural underpinnings have not been adequately addressed, and reformers have settled on promoting piecemeal...

Health-care reform is perennially popular in Alberta, but reality doesn’t match the rhetoric. Government has invested more than $700 million in Primary Care Networks — with little beyond anecdotal evidence of the value achieved with this investment. As the province redirects primary care to...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side,...

We exploit variation across Italian Regions in the implementation of region-specific tariffs within a Prospective Pay System (PPS) for hospitals based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG) to assess their impact on health and on the use of health care services. We consider survey data for the years...

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...

Regulation fostering Managed Care alternatives in health insurance is spreading. This work reports on an experiment designed to measure the amounts of compensation asked by the Swiss population (in terms of reduced premiums) for Managed-Care type restrictions in the provision of health care. It...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting income redistribution entirely to the tax system, while confining public health systems to their insurance role. We argue that this reform...

The introduction of antibiotics as a medical treatment after World War II helped to dramatically increase life expectancy in the industrialized world. As a consequence of over-prescription the last decades ave however seen a sharp increase in prevalence of multi-resistant bacteria, disarming...

The Netherlands is an early mover in healthcare liberalisation. It has a dual policy towards competition enforcement in the sector: not only the general competition rules (the prohibitions on cartels and the abuse of dominance, and merger control) but also rules of sector specific competition...