Supplementary Private Health Insurance in Selected Countries: Lessons for EU Governments?

Sebastian Gechert

No 2739, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to introduce supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. The measure is supposed to lower public health expenditures and to enhance cost efficiency and quality of service. To test these reasonings, the paper draws empirical evidence from the health systems of Australia, Canada and Switzerland. PHI fails to meet the claims in these countries, since it performs worse than SHI concerning cost development and cannot be expected to improve quality. Cream skimming and adverse selection arise instead. Therefore, regulations and incentives are necessary, but they might counteract the aim of lowering public health expenditures.

Keywords: private health insurance; supplementary; country survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G22 H51 I11 I18 L10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp2739.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Supplementary Private Health Insurance in Selected Countries: Lessons for EU Governments? (2010)
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:ces:ceswps:_2739

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().