We investigate whether people enrolled into voluntary health insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption, without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We study the case of Italy, where a mixed insurance system is in...

This paper shows that patients with private health insurance (PHI) are being offered significantly shorter waiting times than patients with statutory health insurance (SHI) in German acute hospital care. This behavior may be driven by the higher expected profitability of PHI relative to SHI...

The paper explores the role that Social Health Insurance (SHI), as an organisational mechanism for raising and pooling additional funds, can play in financing health services in India. It formulates an SHI concept and its aims for India and examines case studies of different countries that have...

This study summarizes what we know and do not know, in both economic theory and empirical practice, about the potential to more closely approximate competitive markets in healthcare and insurance in ways that will do more good than harm to the current dysfunctional system. The alternatives to...

A relatively small but influential economics literature is devoted to financial abuse in Medicare.Much of that literature focuses on upcoding/no upcoding for inpatient hospital care inMedicare Part A, where reimbursements requested are greater/the same as justified by the cost of care provided....

The Affordable Care Act included a provision to eliminate the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap. The policy was phased in by gradually diminishing the gap each year between 2011-2020. This provides a natural experiment to conduct an in-depth study of how the policy affected medication use,...

Governments in many low- and middle-income countries are developing health insurance products as a complement to tax-funded, subsidized provision of health care through publicly operated facilities. This paper discusses two rationales for this transition. First, health insurance would boost...

This paper examines, theoretically and empirically, how changes in the demand for health insurance and medical services in the non-Medicare population -- coverage eligibility changes for parents and the firm size composition of employment – spill over and affect health insurance coverage and...

Background We investigate access disparities in pharmaceutical care among German patients with type 2 diabetes, focusing on differences between public and private health insurance schemes. The primary objectives include investigating whether patients with private health insurance experience...