This chapter reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done since the publication of the first volume of this Handbook. In addition,...

Evidence on how digital technologies, such as online health information platforms, affect the doctorpatient relationship in general, and the diagnosis and treatment of patients in particular, is still limited. In this study, we explore the effects of alternative information from an online source...

Health care is an area that remains formally outside the competence of the EU. Despite this, the union’s influence on national health care policies has increased substantially over the past decade. In a series of rulings, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) established a de facto system of...

While European health care systems are mostly public and similar the contrast is large to the US health industry based to a large extent in the market. Using competence bloc theory the industrial potential of Swedish and European health care is assessed and compared with US health industry. To...

In many health care systems primary care physicians act as 'gatekeepers' to secondary care. We investigates the impact of the UK fundholding scheme under which general practices could elect to hold a budget to meet the costs of elective surgery for their patients. We use a differences in...

Due to various structural pressures predictions of retrenchment and conformity of social policies have been legion, both in terms of expenditure and institutional set-up. Recent research has focused on changes in cash benefits. Comparative analyses of changes in services, the other pillar of...

This toolkit contains the elements needed to understand the problem of medical malpractice in America today, and whether alternative dispute resolution (i.e., arbitration) clauses might be viable among other tort reform options. The toolkit introduces medical liability as an intrinsic component...

Ireland’s health system is at a key turning point. The Irish government was newly elected in February 2011, and the policy directions adopted over the coming months will likely exert a major impact on system performance for many years. Drawing on recent international experience with...

This paper examines how ownership affects professional behaviour, treatment quality and patient satisfaction in the case of hip replacements in Ireland. We use quantitative data for public hospitals and the author’s own surveys for the private sector and qualitative data from 12 interviews,...