IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cesifo/v56y2010i3p444-464.html

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

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Gechert

Abstract

A famous idea to maintain affordable health expenditures is to cut back statutory health insurance (SHI) to a basic insurance and to widen the field for supplementary private health insurance (PHI), permitted to cover the remaining benefits and to apply managed care mechanisms. This is supposed to lower public health expenditures and to enhance cost containment and quality of service. To test these reasonings, the article draws empirical evidence from health insurance markets of Australia (AUS), Canada (CAN), and Switzerland (CH) applying a structure, conduct, and performance (SCP) framework. Irrespective of good preconditions for competition, PHI fails to meet the claims in these countries. Quality improvements cannot be expected, as managed care mechanisms are actually not applied. Expensive cream skimming arises instead. Particularly, the unregulated PHI markets (CAN and CH) perform worse compared to their SHI counterparts concerning total expenses and administrative expenses per insuree, while the more regulated PHI market (AUS) can keep up with its SHI pendant. Neither a regulation-to-cost-containment trade-off nor an equality-to-cost-containment trade-off occurs. However, since strong regulation encourages adverse selection, additional incentives are necessary, but they might counteract the aim of lowering public health expenditures. (JEL codes: H51, G22, I11, I18, L1) Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Gechert, 2010. "Supplementary Private Health Insurance in Selected Countries: Lessons for EU Governments?," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 56(3), pages 444-464, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:56:y:2010:i:3:p:444-464
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifq010
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kumpmann, Ingmar, 2009. "Monopolistic Competition and Costs in the Health Care Sector," IWH Discussion Papers 17/2009, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
    2. Alessandro Petretto, 2013. "On the Fuzzy Boundaries between Public and Private in Health-Care Organization and Funding Systems," Rivista di Politica Economica, SIPI Spa, issue 1, pages 327-370, January-M.
    3. Yu‐Fu Chen & Michael Funke, 2010. "Booms, Recessions And Financial Turmoil: A Fresh Look At Investment Decisions Under Cyclical Uncertainty," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 57(3), pages 290-317, July.
    4. Giovanni Maria Mazzanti & Gianluca Fiorentini, 2012. "Proposte per una revisione del finanziamento e dell’offerta dei servizi odontoiatrici in Italia. L’intervento pubblico e i fondi integrativi," AICCON Working Papers 100-2012, Associazione Italiana per la Cultura della Cooperazione e del Non Profit.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health
    • I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • L10 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:56:y:2010:i:3:p:444-464. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.