Public versus private health care in a national health service

Kurt Brekke () and Lars Sørgard

Health Economics, 2007, vol. 16, issue 6, 579-601

Abstract: This paper studies the interaction between public and private health care provision in a National Health Service (NHS), with free public care and costly private care. The health authority decides whether or not to allow private provision and sets the public sector remuneration. The physicians allocate their time (effort) in the public and (if allowed) in the private sector based on the public wage income and the private sector profits. We show that allowing physician dual practice ‘crowds out’ public provision, and results in lower overall health care provision. While the health authority can mitigate this effect by offering a higher wage, we find that a ban on dual practice is more efficient if private sector competition is weak and public and private care are sufficiently close substitutes. On the other hand, if private sector competition is sufficiently tough, a mixed system, with physician dual practice, is always preferable to a pure NHS system. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.1185

Related works:
Working Paper: Public versus Private Health Care in a National Health Service (2006)
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:wly:hlthec:v:16:y:2007:i:6:p:579-601

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().