Health economics
-
This paper studies the interaction between public and private health care provision in a National Health Service (NHS), with free public care and costly private care. The health authority decides whether or not to allow private provision and sets the public sector remuneration. ⋯ While the health authority can mitigate this effect by offering a higher wage, we find that a ban on dual practice is more efficient if private sector competition is weak and public and private care are sufficiently close substitutes. On the other hand, if private sector competition is sufficiently tough, a mixed system, with physician dual practice, is always preferable to a pure NHS system.
-
Utilizing a panel data set of 50 US states, this note investigates nonstationarity and cointegration of health care expenditures and gross state products (GSP). Both the individual state-based method and the recent panel data method are applied. ⋯ The evidence also suggests that the two series form a cointegrating relationship. The income elasticities of health spending vary over states and became smaller in the 1990s.