No Brasil, o sistema de saúde é composto por duas estruturas: pública, representada pelo Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) e privada suplementar, composta por 1.268 operadoras de planos de saúde, supervisionadas pela Agência Nacional de Saúde (ANS). No entanto, as operadoras têm sido consideradas ineficientes tanto na geração de resultados financeiros quanto na prestação de serviços aos beneficiários, destacando-se a necessidade e relevância para a saúde pública ao se buscar avaliar o seu desempenho sob essas perspectivas. O objetivo do trabalho foi, para um mesmo nível de eficiência na prestação de serviços, identificar as práticas administrativas que diferenciam as operadoras de planos de saúde (OPS) financeiramente sustentáveis. Para tanto, inicialmente foi aplicada a técnica da Análise Envoltória de Dados (DEA) no intuito de identificar operadoras eficientes em transformar inputs em outputs e, a partir dos escores obtidos, selecionar duas OPS de nível de serviços semelhantes e desempenho financeiro opostos para que fossem comparadas por meio de um estudo de múltiplos casos. A análise quantitativa indicou que as OPS de medicina de grupo apresentaram maior eficiência do que as demais modalidades. Já o estudo de múltiplos casos identificou que a gestão de políticas de crédito, de captação e aplicação de recursos, o planejamento tributário, a adoção de políticas de promoção e prevenção à saúde, as formas de remuneração dos médicos e a estratégia de composição de receitas diferenciaram a OPS de melhor desempenho. / In Brazil, the health system is composed of two structures: the public represented by the Unified Health System (SUS) and private supplementary, comprising 1,268 operators of health plans supervised by the National Health Agency (ANS). However, operators have been considered inefficient, both in the generation of financial results as in the provision of services to beneficiaries, highlighting the need and relevance to public health when it comes to assessing their performance in these prospects. The goal was for the same level of efficiency in service delivery, identify management practices that differentiate the health plan operators (OPS) financially sustainable. Thus, it was initially applied to Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to identify carriers of efficient health plans in the processing of inputs and outputs, and the scores by selecting two of them with a similar level of service and opposite financial performance they were compared to the cases of multiple analysis. Quantitative analysis indicated that the support type operators managed showed greater efficiency than other types. The study analysis of multiple cases identified that the political credit management, finance and investments, tax planning, adoption of health promotion and prevention policies, forms of remuneration of doctors and recipe composition of strategy were practices that differentiate the operator with the best performance.

The main theme of the thesis called ‘Marketing plan for Všeobecná zdravotní pojiišťovna for Zlín regional branch office’ is analyzing the current market and on the basis of this analyzes creating a draft of its marketing plan. The theoretical part of this thesis is focused on the process of creating a marketing plan based on literature. In the following practical part, theoretical knowledge is applied surroundings as well as into their analysis and designing a marketing plan for a particular segment.

This dissertation investigates how healthcare provider networks are formed and their effects on patient health outcomes. The first chapter explores three types of hospital networks that are intended to improve coordination of patient care across different hospitals: integrated delivery systems, accountable care organizations, and electronic health records. Using 2007-2017 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society IT data and Medicare data on accountable care organizations and hospital quality, I document several interesting patterns regarding the formation and potential effects of these networks in the United States. I find correlations consistent with assortative matching where higher quality hospitals match with higher quality groups, which may be inefficient if there are peer effects that mean higher quality groups could have more substantial influence on lower quality hospitals that have more room to improve. I show that accountable care organizations appear to be strategic about the network formation process, omitting hospitals that are natural members. They may do so for anticompetitive reasons–ordinary least square regressions find that accountable care organization market concentration is negatively correlated with hospital quality. These regressions additionally point to the need for caution in advocating for a unified electronic health record, as hospital quality is positively correlated with regional electronic health record market concentration–which is related to coordination abilities–but negatively correlated with national concentration–which is related to competition. The second chapter takes inspiration from the descriptive results of the first chapter and establishes a causal effect of electronic health record networks at the patient level. I hypothesize that systematic, reliable transfer of patient medical history can improve clinical decisions and thus health outcomes, especially during medical emergencies. Thus, I identify patients who had emergency cardiovascular episodes in 2007-2014 Medicare claims and use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the causal effect of their primary care and emergency hospitals being in the same electronic health record network. I find that electronic health record compatibility decreases the mortality rate but increases the rate of other bad health outcomes by approximately the same amount, suggesting that compatibility makes it easier for patients to survive given poor health but does not overall improve health otherwise. This result highlights the importance of analyzing the effects of healthcare treatments on both the rates of mortality and negative outcomes in survivors. Only looking at the rate of negative outcomes in survivors, electronic health record compatibility would have appeared to be a harmful treatment, while it was actually reducing mortality. The third chapter moves from hospital networks, which have only one type of agent, to look at physician-insurer networks, represented by a two-sided many-to-many matching market. I use Healthgrades and National Committee for Quality Assurance consumer ratings data to collect physician and insurance plan characteristics, respectively. Descriptive statistics indicate that higher quality physicians are in more insurance networks, while higher quality plans tend to be more restricted in the numbers of physicians they accept. There is a mild correlation between physician and plan quality, but there are many possible explanations for it. To test if it is due to assortative matching and to better understand how physicians and insurers decide with whom to contract, I estimate a structural many-to-many matching model using the matching maximum score estimator. Data quality and quantity appear to be obstacles in obtaining precise estimates, so I leave further exploration of this topic to future research.

Die Einführung des GKV-FQWG sorgt für einen verstärkten Wettbewerbsdruck innerhalb des Systems der gesetzlichen Krankenkassen. Bestehen hohe Anreize zur Risikoselektion, so kann dieser Druck in einen vermehrten Kampf um vermeintlich vorteilhafte Versichertengruppen führen. Die Studie stellt heraus, welche Anreize zur regionalen Risikoselektion unter einem differenzierten Risikostrukturausgleichssystem vorliegen und gibt einen Einblick in die Bedeutung des Problemfeldes. Hierfür werden regionale Versichertenstrukturen gegenüber ihrem geographischen Risikopotential mittels räumlicher Autokorrelationsanalyse untersucht.

In the U.S., the healthcare sector is highly regulated -- government regulation touches almost every dimension of healthcare, from health insurance to pharmaceuticals to medical services. The healthcare sector and the policies that govern it present an interesting setting to study many classic questions in public economics: how does regulation interact with or change individual and firm behavior? How do you monitor third parties who decide how to spend public funds? What happens when policy changes spill over from one segment of the economy to others? The three papers in this dissertation seek to answer these questions via the lens of the U.S. healthcare system. The first paper, "Job Lock, Retirement, and Dependent Health Insurance: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act,'' considers the extent to which changes in policies governing health insurance spill over onto individual labor market decisions. In particular, it looks at whether parents with young adult children eligible for the Affordable Care Act's dependent mandate delayed retirement to take advantage of the mandate. The second paper, "Regulated Revenues and Hospital Behavior: Evidence from a Medicare Overhaul'' (with Tal Gross, Adam Sacarny, and David Silver), considers how healthcare providers respond to changes in regulated prices. In it, we study a major reform that increased Medicare prices for some hospitals but decreased them for others, and consider how hospitals responded to these payment changes. Finally the third paper, "The Costs and Benefits of Monitoring Providers: Evidence from Medicare Audits,'' studies the efficacy of policies aimed at monitoring healthcare providers for wasteful expenditure. It studies a large monitoring program run by Medicare, and estimates the costs and benefits of this monitoring for the government, providers, and patients.

Bibliography: pages 94-102. / There is currently much work underway internationally to improve the accuracy and to refine the detail of accounting for health care expenditures. This research was initiated by the increasing activity in the field of national health accounting, as well as by previous research indicating that the Reserve Bank might be underestimating private health care expenditure in the national accounts. The Reserve Bank estimate of health care expenditure is important as it is the only complete and regularly produced estimate of private sector health care expenditure for South Africa. It was posited that an independent estimation of private health care expenditure would show that its magnitude is underestimated in the expenditure estimates published by the Reserve Bank for the national accounts. This thesis was upheld by the results of the research. The thesis estimate of private health care expenditure was R15 billion, 39% higher than the Reserve Bank estimate available at the time. It was also 21% higher than the final Reserve Bank estimate published in December 1995. The methodology used to derive the thesis estimate involved a survey of national income accounting concepts and guidelines embodied in the internationally used publication, the 1993 System of National Accounts. Primary data was collected from a wide range of institutions in the South African health sector. Secondary data sources were also consulted in several instances. In particular, the Registrar of Medical Schemes was consulted for medical scheme expenditure estimates as they constitute the largest portion of private sector health care expenditure in South Africa. The thesis estimate was then calculated for a single year according to the 1993 System of National Accounts guidelines. The year chosen was the government financial year from April 1992 to March 1993. The year was chosen to coincide with the year chosen for a national health expenditure review. In the presentation of the results, the estimate was broken down in separate "sources" and "uses" matrices, which are being used internationally to present national health accounting information. From the comparison of the Reserve Bank and thesis expenditure estimates, one of the most important recommendations that emerged was that the Reserve Bank should consult a wider range of expenditure data sources, more timeously and regularly. In particular, it was suggested that the Reserve Bank should negotiate earlier access to the data held by the Registrar of Medical Schemes, as well as cross-check household survey data with independent estimates of out-of-pocket and statutory scheme health care expenditure. In addition to providing a new benchmark estimate for private sector health care expenditure in the government financial year 1992/93, the breakdown of the estimate into matrices provides a framework that could be used as the basis for the development of more detailed satellite national health accounts, in accordance with 1993 SNA standards.

Medical identity fraud is a byproduct of identity theft; it enables imposters to procure medical treatment, thus defrauding patients, insurers, and government programs through forged prescriptions, falsified medical records, and misuse of victim's health insurance. In 2014, for example, the United States Government lost $14.1 billion in improper payments. The purpose of this multiple case study, grounded by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act as the conceptual framework, was to explore the strategies 5 healthcare leaders used to prevent identity theft and medical identity fraud and thus improve business performance in the state of New York. Data were collected using telephone interviews and open-ended questions. The data were analyzed using Yin's 5 step process. Based on data analysis, 5 themes emerged including: training and education (resulting to sub-themes: train employees, train patients, and educate consumers), technology (which focused on Kiosk, cloud, off-site storage ending with encryption), protective measures, safeguarding personally identifiable information, and insurance. Recommendations calls for leaders of large, medium, and small healthcare organizations and other industries to educate employees and victims of identity theft because the problems resulting from fraud travel beyond the borders of medical facilities: they flow right into consumers' residences. Findings from this study may contribute to social change through improved healthcare services and reduced medical costs, leading to more affordable healthcare.

No description available.

<p>This thesis studies the impacts of three government policy interventions in Canada on individuals' behaviour and attempts to bound structural coefficients implied by economics theories using the estimated treatment effects. While the last chapter is on the healthcare market, the first three chapters focus on individuals' charitable behaviour, especially volunteer behaviour. A compulsory volunteer policy in Ontario is investigated from theoretical and empirical perspectives in chapters one and two respectively. In a theoretical overlapping generation model with social capital accumulation, we find that such a policy likely increases total public good provision and the social capital level. However, whether it increases long-run volunteering by those no longer subject to the policy depends crucially on the size of a public good demand elasticity. Chapter two empirically examines the impact of a “compulsory volunteerism” policy for adolescents on subsequent behaviour in Ontario, which mandates 40-hours of community service for high school students as a requirement for graduation. We estimate that: 1) the compulsory volunteer policy increased volunteer participation during high school; 2) those affected by the policy likely volunteered less than they otherwise would have after high school completion; 3) young people in Ontario who were not directly affected by the policy volunteered less after its introduction.</p> <p>The third chapter examines the impact of tax policy changes on individuals' volunteer behaviour and attempts to analyze the relationship between donations of time and money. We develop a model where individuals are heterogeneous in their labour market and volunteer productivities, and in their tastes, which shows that positive cross sectional correlation between donations of money and time may occur because of individual-specific effects even though each individual would regard such donations as substitutes. Exploiting the exogenous variation in the tax price introduced by a series of tax policy changes in Canada, we find that individuals make more time donations as the tax price of charitable donations increases, which casts doubt on earlier findings in cross sectional data that monetary and time donations are complements and suggests that they may be substitutes as most theories would imply.</p> <p>The last chapter exploits changes in Canadian public health insurers' reimbursement schedules regarding chiropractic services to identify the impacts of subsidies for providers and patients. Over the past two decades, fiscal pressures have seen these services partly or completely “delisted” from public health insurance programs. Despite a large sample of individuals, there are challenges for inference in this situation where the source of exogenous variation derives from a small number of jurisdiction-level policy changes. To address them, we employ aggregation, a wild cluster bootstrap that provides asymptotic refinement, and other approaches. The results show appreciable decreases in providers’ incomes and in utilization with the latter concentrated among low and middle income patients. But, chiropractors also augment their labour supply, perhaps increasing administration, marketing/promotion, or time per patient visit.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work. Chapter 1 examines the effect of state-level health insurance mandates, which are regulations intended to expand access to health insurance. It finds that these regulations have the unintended consequence of increasing insurance premiums, and that these regulations have been responsible for 9-23% of premium increases since 1996. The main contribution of the chapter is that its results are more general than previous work, since it considers many more years of data, and it studies the employer-based plans that cover most Americans rather than the much less common individual plans. Whereas Chapter 1 estimates the effect of the average mandate on premiums, Chapter 2 focuses on a specific mandate, one that requires insurers to cover prostate cancer screenings. The focus on a single mandate allows a broader and more careful analysis that demonstrates how health policies spill over to affect the labor market. I find that the mandate has a significant negative effect on the labor market outcomes of the very group it was intended to help. The mandate expands the treatments health insurance covers for men over age 50, but by doing so it makes them more expensive to insure and employ. Employers respond to this added expense by lowering wages and hiring fewer men over age 50. According to the theoretical model put forward in the chapter, this suggests the mandate reduces total welfare. Chapter 3 shows that the employer-based health insurance system has deterred entrepreneurship. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate, which de-linked insurance from employment for many 19-25 year olds. Difference-in-difference estimates show that the mandate increased self-employment among the treated group by 13-24%. Instrumental variables estimates show that those who actually received parental health insurance as a result of the mandate were drastically more likely to start their own business. This suggest that concerns over health insurance are a major barrier to entrepreneurship in the United States. / Economics