Health, the medical profession, and regulation

Abstract

Twelve papers, presented at the Third European Conference on Health Economics, held in Stockholm in August 1995, illuminate issues of health and its determinants; the behavior of physicians; and the regulation of the health care sector. Papers discuss the impact of the environment on the demands for health and health care in Germany; the Grossman model of the demand for health and the demand for medical services tested using panel data; counting and discounting gained life-years; inequality in infant mortality in Portugal, 1971-91; health, work-hours, and wages in Sweden; a pooled data analysis of the determinants of health expenditure in the OECD countries; a test of whether clinical decisions are influenced by the relative costs of treatments, using data from Norwegian hospitals; the use of multilevel analysis to examine the effect of competition on general practitioners' behavior; a comparative application of econometric-frontier and data-envelopment-analysis methods for assessing the cost efficiency of Finnish hospitals; financial incentives and primary care provision in Britain; evidence from Switzerland on the question of cream-skimming in deregulated social health insurance; and the modeling of cross-border care in the EU using a principal-agent framework. Zweifel is with the Socioeconomic Institute at the University of Zurich. Index.