International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Price setting in the Brazilian private health insurance sector
AbstractBrazil ’s private health insurance market is the second largest in the world, behind only the United States, making it a valuable source of real-world evidence. This paper documents how physicians' inpatient reimbursement fees vary in the country and explores the relationship between these fees and the m arket share of health providers and health insurance companies. We implement a fixed-effects panel regression and take advantage of an unprecedented database that contains national administrative records of inpatient procedures paid by health insurance companies in 2016. We find a positive correlati on between re...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - September 10, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Income-related inequality in obesity and its determinants in Spain: What happens beyond the obesity threshold?
AbstractThis paper computes and decomposes income-related inequalities in three metrics of obesity, namely, status, depth and severity, for Spain, a European country characterized by a universal health care system with very high and rising obesity prevalence rates. Furthermore, this paper investigates the main determinants of the reduction in obesity inequalities observed over time among the female Spanish population. To compute these inequality indexes, we use cross-sectional and individual-level data gathered from the Spanish National Health Survey. We document income-related inequalities in obesity, that are more pronou...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - August 3, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Matching patients with therapists in culturally diverse rehabilitation services during civil unrest
AbstractA primary consideration in rehabilitation is the compatibility between clinicians and patients, where cultural diversity is a defining feature for both. The intricacies of cultural considerations in patient-clinician matching are heightened in areas of conflict and civil unrest. This paper presents three perspectives of the significance of cultural considerations in such assignments: patient-centred approach - prioritizing patients ’ preferences; professional-centred approach - clinicians’ safety, social-emotional, and training needs; and utilitarian approach - what is best for the majority. A case study from a...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - June 28, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Medicaid physician fees and the use of primary care services: evidence from before and after the ACA fee bump
AbstractWe examine whether fees paid by Medicaid for primary care affects the use of health care services among adults with Medicaid coverage who have a high school or less than high school degree. The analysis spans the large changes in Medicaid fees that occurred before and after the ACA-mandated fee increase for primary care services in 2013 –2014. We use data from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System and a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the association between Medicaid fees and whether a person has a personal doctor; a routine check-up or flu shot in the past year; whether a woman had a pap...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - June 16, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Finding fraud: enforcement, detection, and recoveries after the ACA
AbstractMedicaid Fraud Control Units investigate and prosecute acts of financial fraud and patient abuse within the program. Prior to the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), federal government MFCU expenditures totaled half a percent of Medicaid expenditures. Following the enrollment of 12 million adults into the Medicaid program under the ACA, expenditures for these units are now less than pre-ACA levels, as a share of program expenses. We use data for states ’ fraud enforcement efforts in the period 2010–2018 and a difference-in-differences design that exploits states’ decision to expand Medi...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - May 15, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Priority setting in the German healthcare system: results from a discrete choice experiment
AbstractWorldwide, social healthcare systems must face the challenges of a growing scarcity of resources and of its inevitable distributional effects. Explicit criteria are needed to define the boundaries of public reimbursement decisions. As Germany stands at the beginning of such a discussion, more formalised priority setting procedures seem in order. Recent research identified multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) as a promising approach to inform and to guide decision-making in healthcare systems. In that regard, this paper aims to analyse the relative weight assigned to various criteria in setting priority intervent...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - May 15, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

How does the quality of care for type 2 diabetic patients benefit from GPs-nurses ’ teamwork? A staggered difference-in-differences design based on a French pilot program
AbstractIn many countries, policies have explicitly encouraged primary care teams and inter-professional cooperation and skill mix, as a way to improve both productive efficiency gains and quality improvement. France faces barriers to developing team working as well as new and more advanced roles for health care professionals including nurses. We aim to estimate the impact of a national pilot experiment of teamwork between general practitioners (GPs) and advance practitioners nurses (APN) –who substitute and complement GPs–on yearly quality of care process indicators for type two diabetes patients (T2DP). Implemented b...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 27, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The effectiveness of vaccination, testing, and lockdown strategies against COVID-19
AbstractThe ability of various policy activities to reduce the reproduction rate of the COVID-19 disease is widely discussed. Using a stringency index that comprises a variety of lockdown levels, such as school and workplace closures, we analyze the effectiveness of government restrictions. At the same time, we investigate the capacity of a range of lockdown measures to lower the reproduction rate by considering vaccination rates and testing strategies. By including all three components in an SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Recovery) model, we show that a general and comprehensive test strategy is instrumental in reducing the ...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 27, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Are women breaking the glass ceiling? A gendered analysis of the duration of sick leave in Spain
AbstractWe study the gender gap in the duration of sick leave in Spain by splitting this duration into two types of days – those which are related to biological characteristics and those derived from behavioral reasons. Using the Statistics of Accidents at Work for 2011–2019, we found that women presented longer standard durations (i.e., purely attached to physiological reasons) compared to men. However, when esti mating individuals’ efficiency as the ratio between actual and standard durations, we found that women were more inefficient at lower levels of income, whereas in case of men, this occurred at higher levels...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 24, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Intensification or diversification: responses by anti health-pass entrepreneurs to French government announcements
AbstractWe study the extent to which French entrepreneurs mobilized in an online collective action against the generalization of the health-pass policy in summer 2021. We document the dynamics of registrations on the websiteAnimap.fr where entrepreneurs could claim they would not check the health-pass of their clients. We first note an over-representation of complementary and alternative medicine practitioners among the mobilized people. We also suggest that professionals related to the touristic industry mobilized on the website. Second, we show that the government announcements led to an increase in the mobilization. How...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 20, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Do budget constraints limit access to health care? Evidence from PCI treatments in Hungary
AbstractUnder Hungary ’s single payer health care system, hospitals face an annual budget cap on most of their diagnoses-related group based reimbursements. In July 2012, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) treatments of acute myocardial infarction were exempted from that hospital level budget cap. We use countryw ide individual-level patient data from 2009 to 2015 to map the effect of such a quasi-experimental change in monetary incentives on health provider decisions and health outcomes. We find that direct admissions into PCI-capable hospitals increase, especially in central Hungary, where there are severa l hosp...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 19, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

National or local infodemic? The demand for news in Italy during COVID-19
AbstractInformation can have an important impact on health behavior and, according to the World Health Organization, an ‘infodemic’ has accompanied the current pandemic. Observing TV news viewership in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic using actual consumption data, we investigate whether demand for national and local news depends on national or local epidemiological developments, as measured by the number of ne w positives or the number of current positives on any given day. Exploiting the fact that the impact of the pandemic displays a great deal of variation among the different regions, we find that at the regional...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 17, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Hospital cost efficiency: an examination of US acute care inpatient hospitals
AbstractThe use of stochastic frontier models for inference on hospital efficiency is complicated by the inability to fully control for quality differences across hospitals. Additionally, the potential existence of cross-sectional dependence due to the presence of unobserved common factors leads to endogeneity problems that can bias both cost function and efficiency estimates. Using a panel consisting of 1518 hospitals for the years 1996 –2013 (T = 18), I adopt techniques for dealing with long, cross-sectionally dependent panel data in order to estimate cost parameters and hospital specific efficiency. In particular, I...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 17, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Total expenditure elasticity of spending on self-treatment and professional healthcare: a case of Russia
AbstractThe studies on the demand for healthcare in low- and middle-income countries rarely take into consideration the fact that many people spend their income on self-treatment and professional treatment. The estimation of the income elasticity of demand for self-treatment and professional treatment can show a more precise picture of the affordability of professional care. This paper contributes to the discussion around estimates of income elasticity of health spending and discussion whether professional care and self-treatment are close to a luxury good and inferior good respectively in a middle-income country. We apply...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 6, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The effect of health facility births on newborn mortality in Malawi
AbstractWe examine the effect of health facility delivery on newborn mortality in Malawi using data from a survey of mothers in the Chimutu district, Malawi. The study exploits labour contraction time as an instrumental variable to overcome endogeneity of health facility delivery. The results show that health facility delivery does not reduce 7-day and 28-day mortality rates. In a low-income country like Malawi where the healthcare quality is severely compromised, we conclude that encouraging health facility delivery may not guarantee positive health outcomes for newborn births. (Source: International Journal of Health Car...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - April 3, 2023 Category: Health Management Source Type: research