Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
As COVID-19 has made many of us acutely aware, providing high quality mental health care is vital. However, the mental health care market is a difficult one for insurers; there is evidence that uncertainty and variation in treatments are greater compared to physical health conditions (for instance, see Frank et al. 2000). Thus uncertainty and…
Financial incentives matter. If one had to give economists (and health economists as well) a slogan, this would be it. In 2006, the Netherlands instituted a form of managed competition. According to Van Dijk et al (2012) “Before 2006, inhabitants had either compulsory social (sickness fund, 62%) or voluntarily private (36%) health insurance depending, among others, on income (below a gross…
What are hospitals like in the Netherlands? A paper by Blank and Van Hulst (2009) give some insight. The paper studies Dutch general hospitals. These hospitals make up 80% of beds on 70% of hospital costs. Non-general hospitals include academic hospitals and specialty hospitals (e.g., eye clinics and rehabilitation clinics). Hospitals in the Netherlands “Hospitals,…
In the Netherlands, the Health Insurance Act of 2006 mandates that all individuals have health insurance. Health insurance is provided by the private sector and these private health insurers can charge any premium they please. The government does provide some risk-adjusted payment to the insurance companies. This means that the state gives insurance company more…
In this blog, I have written about the Swiss (part one, part two) and Dutch healthcare system extensively. Both systems have a “regulated competition” where insurance is mandatory and insurance companies are mandated to provide a specific insurance benefit package. In the Swiss system, 85% of medical expenditures are financed by insurance premiums and 15%…