Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients' right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

Patient mobility is a key issue in the EU who recently passed a new law on patients’ right to EU-wide provider choice. In this paper we use a Hotelling model with two regions that differ in technology to study the impact of patient mobility on health care quality, health care financing and...

Since 1996 New Zealand has had a Code of Patients' Rights enforceable by complaints to an independent ombudsman. Patients are entitled to receive health care of an appropriate standard, to give informed consent, and to complain to a health commissioner about perceived malpractice. The...

National interest in the quality of American health care increased dramatically in 1999. The press, the Institute of Medicine, legislators, physicians, and hospitals joined in a vigorous policy discussion. But a similar debate occurred in 1988, following reports from four public agencies that...

Health systems in Western countries are plagued by inefficiency and will likely require a substantial increase in the tax burden as populations age. Patients might also face a gradual decrease in the quality and scope of services. The organisational changes needed to drive costs down and...

We consider how purchasers and providers negotiate the quality element of contracts when the purchasers are required to link a fixed proportion of revenue to quality. A simple model predicts that the complexity of the quality element will depend on purchaser and provider characteristics. Using...

New empirical evidence shows substantial heterogeneity in the altruism of healthcare providers. Spurred by this evidence, we build a spatial quality competition model with altruism heterogeneity. We find that more altruistic healthcare providers supply relatively higher quality levels and...

Many health economists demand more competition in the health care system. They focus on the competition between sickness funds for insured and the competition between health care providers for contracts with sickness funds. But they neglect the competition between health care providers for...

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...