Previous literature indicates that non-economic damages caps increase the number of physicians but finds no significant effect on health. A potential explanation is that, by reducing the cost of malpractice, caps affect physicians’ incentives to provide high quality care, an important...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the adverse selection in participation in the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS), as well as in outpatient and inpatient service utilization, in Chaoyang, Beijing, China. Design/methodology/approach – Probit model is established to...

The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians' services. As a part of the reform, co-payments for prescription drugs were increased step up to 200%. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the...

Health care industry is often referred to a sunrise industry for management professionals, which is often despised from consumer point of view. Health care consumer’s satisfaction is very essential parameter to measure the success of health organizations. Patient satisfaction is assumed to be...

The U.S. drugs-to-patients system fails to achieve its overall system goal of better drugs, sooner, at lower cost. The key constraint that impedes achieving this goal is the FDA's enormously expensive and time consuming clinical testing process. Fixing this constraint should be a strategic...

The open-ended nature of Medicare and Medicaid funding in the US has made increased governmental oversight of the health sector partly an exercise in fiscal self-preservation. Most EU countries, on the other hand, exert tighter control over total health care spending through budgetary processes,...

Rationale: Accurate estimation and prediction of health care costs play crucial roles in the decisions of health plans and other health care agencies on policies and resource allocation. A particularly problematic issue that underlies difficulties in filling that role is the impact of...

This research compares the behavior of non-profit organizations and private for-profit firms under strong incentives from a government program. Specifically, I study the hospice industry, where there are financial incentives created by the Medicare benefit. After controlling for a number of...

Debate continues on whether consolidation in health care markets enhances efficiency and quality or instead facilitates collusion and market power. We address this issue by comparing the quality of patient care in hospitals before and after mergers and acquisitions which occurred in California...

In people with diabetes, a foot infection often leads to amputation. Plain film x-ray is the traditional method in assessing foot bone infections but magnetic resonance is more sensitive and specific. A comparison is performed here between radiography and radiography plus magnetic resonance in...