Lead me not into temptation: drug price regulation and dispensing physicians in Switzerland
Maurus Rischatsch (maurus.rischatsch@econ.uzh.ch)
The European Journal of Health Economics, 2014, vol. 15, issue 7, 697-708
Abstract:
While most countries separate drug prescription and dispensation to ensure independent drug choice, some allow this combination to increase pharmaceutical access in rural areas or to increase the utilization of pharmacist skills. A drawback of this approach is that dispensing physicians or prescribing pharmacists may be incentivized to increase their own profits through the prescription of cost-inefficient drug packages, leading to an increase in pharmaceutical spending. Switzerland constitutes an interesting example of where dispensing and non-dispensing physicians coexist, permitting a comparison of their prescribing behavior. The present study shows that drug margin optimization is possible under the current drug price regulation scheme in Switzerland. Using drug claims data, empirical findings indicate a 5–10 % higher margin per dose for dispensing physicians compared to pharmacists. Cost per dose is 3–5 % higher when dispensed by physicians instead of pharmacists. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
Keywords: Physician dispensing; Prescribing behavior; Pharmaceutical pricing; Physician agency; I10; I11; C11; C54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10198-013-0515-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eujhec:v:15:y:2014:i:7:p:697-708
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10198-013-0515-y
Access Statistics for this article
The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg
More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).