We leverage decades of administrative data and quasi-experimental variation in the introduction of universal long-term care (LTC) insurance in Germany in 1995 to examine whether health insurance expansions can stimulate local economies. We find that the LTC insurance rollout led not only to...

Background Medicare Advantage (MA) penetration rates have shown an increase in rural areas in the past decade, increasing the bargaining power of MA plans relative to rural hospitals. We study the effect that this increase has had in the revenue of rural hospitals through reductions in the...

Background Adjusting the health insurance reimbursement rate is essential to optimize the allocation of medical resources. This paper investigates the effect of health insurance reimbursement rates on middle-aged and elderly people's choice of hospitals in China. Methods This study is conducted...

Die Sozialabgaben in Deutschland haben mit 42 % die einst als unüberschreitbar geltende "Haltelinie" von 40 % bereits deutlich überschritten. Besonders dramatisch entwickeln sich die Zusatzbeiträge der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (GKV): von 1,7 % im Jahr 2024 auf aktuell 2,9 % im zweiten...

Die vorliegende Studie diskutiert die Prognoseergebnisse für die Kostenentwicklung im Bereich der obligatorischen Kranken- und Pflegeversicherung (OKP). Innerhalb der deskriptiven Diskussion der Datenlage werden für die Kostengruppen wie auch die Kantone die letztjährigen Wachstumsraten mit...

Germany spent the most on healthcare out of any country in the EU and is only surpassed worldwide by the USA. However, German health expenditure has not exploded despite the coronavirus pandemic. The declining share of German hospital expenditures is striking. A comparison with the Scandinavian...

The German Federal Government has initiated key projects and reforms for the future development of healthcare in Germany. These include political initiatives for deregulation, digitisation, and large-scale structural projects. However, rather than directly contributing to the relief of the...

Die vorliegende Studie diskutiert die Prognoseergebnisse für die Kostenentwicklung im Bereich der obligatorischen Kranken- und Pflegeversicherung (OKP). Innerhalb der deskriptiven Diskussion der Datenlage werden für die Kostengruppen wie auch die Kantone die letztjährigen Wachstumsraten mit...

We estimate the role of firms in worker health care utilization. Using linked administrative data on Austrian workers from 1998-2018, we exploit mobility between firms to estimate how much a firm contributes to worker-level differences in utilization in a setting with non-employer provided...

Upcoding in Medicare has been a topic of interest to economists and policy makers for nearly 40 years. While upcoding is generally understood as "billing for services at higher level of complexity than the service actually pro- vided or documented," it has a wide range of definitions within the...

Background Acute stroke treatment is time-critical. To provide qualified stroke care in areas without 24/7 availability of a stroke neurologist, the concept of teleneurology was established, which is based on remote video communication through telemedicine organized by telestroke networks. Data...

Until very recently, Britain's National Health Service used to be beyond argument. The reverence for the health service often precluded anything resembling a rational discussion around it: the social taboos were simply too strong. Yet over the past two years or so, this has begun to change. We...

Background Type 1 diabetes (T1D) management exerts a considerable financial burden on patients, caregivers, and developing nations at large. In Ghana, a key governments effort to attenuate the financial burden of T1D on patients was to fashion safety-net mechanisms through financial risk...

Objective The integration of the health insurance fund pool may threaten the sustainability of the fund by increasing its expenditures through the exacerbation of the moral hazard of participations. The purpose of this paper is to assess and predict the impact of the single pool reform of...

Background The occurrence of health shocks affects households economically in various ways. It most often leads to missed work, thus inducing a decrease in productivity and a loss of income. These effects are even more significant if the extent of absenteeism is high or if its duration is long....

Background The Statutory Health Insurance scheme is one of two main schemes of health care system financing in Europe. This scheme mainly relies on wage-based contributions from employers and employees and is thus prone to business cycle fluctuations. This turned out to be a problem especially...

For more than 25 years, the Social Security Trust Fund has been projected to run out of money in 2033 (give or take a few years), potentially causing benefits to be severely reduced in the absence of corrective legislative action. Today (February 2024), projections are made by the Social...

In this paper, we examine trends in provider fees charged, government expenditure on private out-of-hospital medical services, and out of pocket costs following policy changes intended to reduce government expenditure. We examine the experience of a high-need patient group: people diagnosed with...

Universal health coverage is a widely shared goal across lower-income countries. We conducted a large-scale, 4-year trial that randomized premiums and subsidies for India's first national, public hospital insurance program, RSBY. We find roughly 60% uptake even when consumers were charged...

Universal health coverage is a widely shared goal across lower-income countries. We conducted a large-scale, 4-year trial that randomized premiums and subsidies for India's first national, public hospital insurance program, RSBY. We find roughly 60% uptake even when consumers were charged...

The Extended Medicare Safety Net (EMSN) in Australia was designed to provide financial assistance to patients with high out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for medical treatment. The EMSN works on a calendar year basis. Once a patient incurs a specified amount of OOP costs, the EMSN provides additional...

Universal health coverage is a widely shared goal across lower-income countries. We conducted a large-scale, 4-year trial that randomized premiums and subsidies for India's first national, public hospital insurance program, RSBY. We find roughly 60% uptake even when consumers were charged...

Foreigners from third countries are not entitled to participate in the Czech public health insurance system unless they have either permanent residence in the Czech Republic or a Czech employer. This article aims to analyse the economic impact of the possible inclusion of such foreigners into...

The examination of the causal impact of health insurance coverage on healthcare utilisation is a critical endeavour in both academic research and policy formulation. However, this endeavour faces challenges, notably the endogenous selection into coverage and prevalent misreporting of coverage...

In the March 2024 issue, Wirtschaftsdienst published an article entitled "Inflation calculation: ECB Interest Rate Policy is Not Statistically Recognised as a Driver of Inflation" by Johannes Schwanitz. Manuel Rupprecht takes a different view in a reply; Schwanitz then explains his position in a...

We quantify the impact of federal subsidies for graduate medical education on primary care physician (PCP) supply by examining the impact of Section 5503 of the Affordable Care Act, which increased the number of residents that teaching hospitals in rural and high-need areas could receive...

The German Federal Government has initiated key projects and reforms for the future development of healthcare in Germany. These include political initiatives for deregulation, digitisation, and large-scale structural projects. However, rather than directly contributing to the relief of the...

Background: This study aims to examine the impact of different healthcare payment systems, specifically salary and fee-for-service (FFS) models, on service provision, patient welfare, and quality of care. The influence of payment models on healthcare delivery and patient outcomes, as well as how...