Journal of health economics
-
This paper employs the method of Aronson et al. (1994) to decompose the redistributive effect of the Dutch health care financing system into three components: a progressivity component, a classical horizontal equity component and a reranking component. Results are presented for the health care financing system as a whole, as well as for its constituent parts. A final section sets out to uncover the relative importance (in terms of their effects on progressivity, horizontal equity and reranking) of the key institutional features of one component of the Dutch system-the AWBZ social insurance scheme.
-
This article examines the effect of a private sector on the waiting time associated with treatment in a public hospital. Without rationing of waiting-list admissions, a private sector is shown to result in a longer waiting time if the demand for a public treatment is sufficiently elastic with respect to the waiting time. When waiting-list admissions are rationed, the waiting time is shown to increase if the public sector consultants are permitted to work in the private sector in their spare time.
-
Before 1990 Australian general practitioners (GPs) were remunerated according to consultation length. This was assumed to encourage GPs to prescribe more, counsel less and provide fewer treatments than were 'appropriate'. ⋯ This paper analyses, through the use of multilevel modelling, the effect of content-based descriptors on the discrete choice behaviour of GPs while controlling for patient, GP and practice characteristics. GPs who used content-based descriptors were just as likely to prescribe, counsel and treat compared to GPs who used time-based descriptors.
-
This study analyzes Canadian cigarette consumption and taxation between 1980 and 1994, a period in which there have been large price rises and declines, and a dramatic increase in the consumption of contraband tobacco products. We examine elasticities of legal cigarette sales and total sales (including contraband) with respect to the price of legal cigarettes and various other factors. The growth of the contraband market since 1987 appears to have created two classes of cigarette--taxed and untaxed--with responses to changes in the legal price that are respectively higher, and lower, than was previously the case. The sensitivity of total cigarette sales to the taxation instrument is much lower than it would appear from sales of taxed cigarettes alone.