It takes three to tango: Soft budget constraint and cream skimming in the hospital care market

Rosella Levaggi and Marcello Montefiori

POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS

Abstract: Cream skimming is an illegal behaviour that consists in choosing to treat patients according to their ability to recover. It arises from the use of prospective payment schemes in an asymmetry of information framework. In this context in fact the provider can observe some relevant information (freely or at a cost) before making its effort which will then be used to its own advantage. The paper studies the scope for these types of behaviour in a mixed market for hospital care where the hospitals do not share the same objectives. We show that in this context cream skimming is made possible by the presence of two important elements: the public hospital prefers to treat high severity patients and the regulator is unable to enforce hard budget constraint rules. The paper adds an important dimension to the study of cream skimming as proposed by the traditional literature where asymmetry of information alone is considered the cause of this market failure. In our context, in fact, cream skimming arises mainly from a regulatory failure.

JEL-codes: D82 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2005-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Oi342h9N3i8oXfxSP ... 5aZ/view?usp=sharing (application/pdf)

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:uca:ucapdv:48

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in POLIS Working Papers from Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucia Padovani ().