Vertragswettbewerb im Gesundheitswesen / Double-sided Competition for the German Health Care Market

Börsch-Supan Axel ()
Additional contact information
Börsch-Supan Axel: Ph.D., Mannheim Institute for the Economics of Aging (MEA) Universität Mannheim, 68131 Mannheim, Germany

Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik), 2007, vol. 227, issue 5-6, 451-465

Abstract: Germany spends more than 11% of GDP on health care - after the US and Switzerland the third most expensive system in the world. At the same time, healthy life expectancy is just about average among the OECD countries. This indicates that the German health care system suffers from inefficiency. Other OECD countries, notably Sweden, achieve much higher healthy life expectancies at considerably lower costs.This paper addresses how the efficiency of the German health care system should be improved upon. Our central argument departs from the well-known observation that information about efficient health care procedures and technologies is asymmetric: insurances know better than consumers which doctors and hospital deliver high quality at lower prices. Hence, the role of health insurances as information mediators between consumers and providers is crucial. Thus, on the one hand, health insurances should gain more market power in the provider market, in which insurance companies pay the services of doctors and hospitals, in order to control costs. One the other hand, however, this increased market power in the provider market needs to be counter-balanced by more competition in the insurance market, in which consumers purchase insurance policies. This requires free choice of consumers among insurance contracts with different prices.

Keywords: Health care markets; efficiency of health care provision; competition in health care provision; Health care markets; efficiency of health care provision; competition in health care provision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2007-5-604 (text/html)

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:jns:jbstat:v:227:y:2007:i:5-6:p:451-465

DOI: 10.1515/jbnst-2007-5-604

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik) is currently edited by Peter Winker

More articles in Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbuecher fuer Nationaloekonomie und Statistik) from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().