The role of Regional Primary Care Organisations in assisting practices to increase quality is not understood. General Practitioners in Australia are predominantly paid through Medicare, the national fee-for-service scheme for doctors. From 1998, this was supplemented by the gradual introduction...

Prices for consultations with General Practitioners (GPs) in Australia are unregulated, and patients pay the difference between the price set by the GP and a fixed reimbursement from the national tax-funded Medicare insurance scheme. We construct a Vickrey-Salop model of GP price and quality...

We quantify competition in Australia's residential aged care sector and study how competition is associated with quality of care and prices in the sector. Competition is defined three ways: the number of competitors within a 10 km radius of a facility; the distance (in km) to the third closest...

In recent years, with the aim of containing cost pressure and improving efficiency, many countries have begun to introduce market mechanisms into the aged care sector. Under the right conditions, competition can spur providers to compete by cutting costs, offering better prices and higher...