Midwest Health Services: Purchasing Patient Snacks

Purchasing health care services from providers with unknown altruism.

Cost-sharing rules for paying physicians have been advanced as a way of generating incentives for the provision of quality care, while recognizing their potential negative effects on production efficiency. However, the optimal sharing rate typically depends on the degree to which the physician acts in the interest of the patient, what we identify as the physician's altruism. Since the degree of...

[The strategic purchasing of health services: a big opportunity for the National Universal Health System].

proposed to establish a service packages, whether through a single obligatory list or through the definition of a flexible, high priority set to be offered to specific populations according to their economic possibilities. For the strategic purchasing of services, two alternatives are proposed: to assign the fund either to a single national manager or to each of the existing public provider ins...

Health insurance purchasing cooperatives.

S mall employers have particular disadvantages as purchasers of health insurance.They often are not well informed about the insurance options available to them because, unlike large employers, they do not have specialized staff to manage their employee benefit programs. Small business owners, who usually make decisions about insurance for their firms, typically have little time or expertise to ...

Hospital purchasing alliances: utilization, services, and performance.

BACKGROUND Hospital purchasing alliances are voluntary consortia of hospitals that aggregate their contractual purchases of supplies from manufacturers. Purchasing groups thus represent pooling alliances rather than trading alliances (e.g., joint ventures). Pooling alliances have been discussed in the health care management literature for years but have never received much empirical investigati...

Public health medicine and purchasing health care.