Suchergebnisse

AbstractHealth economics as a discipline is described using six questions to be answered: Is health different from all other goods? Is the 'cost explosion' the core issue? What is the relative importance of moral hazard and adverse selection in competitive health insurance? What is the relevance of supplier‐induced demand? For evaluation, is cost effectiveness the appropriate standard? And finally, can the the very high degree of regulation in health care be justified on economic grounds? While the answers are soundly grounded in microeconomic theory, they show that economists interested in health and health care are far from the caricature of penny‐pinching 'Elephants in a porcelain shop' (Gbadebo & Reinhardt, 2001).

AbstractThis contribution evokes Orio Giarini's courage to think 'outside the box'. It proposes a practical way to bridge the gap between risk (where probabilities of occurrence are fully known) and uncertainty (where these probabilities are unknown). However, in the context of insurance, neither extreme applies: the risk type of a newly enrolled customer is not fully known, loss distributions (especially their tails) are difficult to estimate with sufficient precision, the diversification properties of a block of policies acquired from another company can be assessed only to an approximation, and rates of return on investment depend on decisions of central banks that cannot be predicted too well. This contribution revolves around the launch of an innovative insurance product, where the company has a notion of whether a favourable market reception is more likely than an unfavourable one, of the chance of obtaining approval from the regulatory authority and the risk of a competitor launching a similar innovation. Linear partial information theory is proposed and applied as a particular practical way to systematically exploit the imprecise information that may exist for all of these aspects. The decision-making criterion is maxEmin, an intuitive modification of the maximin rule known from games against nature.

AbstractMany observers have been puzzled by the sight of otherwise freedom‐loving citizens consenting to the stripping of their civil rights and the massive budgetary expansion of their governments in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Conversely, governments who 'kept their cool' such as those of Brazil and Sweden were heavily criticised by the Western media. Adopting James Buchanan's contractarian approach, this article seeks to model how the interplay between citizens and their government is affected by a health crisis. Citizens' increased willingness to pay for improved control of risks is found to play a major role.

AbstractWhile most major reforms of health systems fail, those that succeed are motivated by politicians' quest for reducing the health burden on their budget in response to a shift in voters' preferences away from public health. An Edgeworth box is used to depict their preferences, in addition to those of (potential) patients and health‐care providers. Politicians are found to severely constrain the area of mutual advantage, suggesting that only minor reforms are possible unless they promise to lower health‐care expenditure. An efficiency‐enhancing change that would enlarge the box and hence the area of mutual advantage would be to suppress the requirement imposed on health insurers to purchase domestically, rather than being free to directly import health‐care services and drugs.