Do doctors respond to financial incentives? UK family doctors and the GP fundholder scheme

Do doctors respond to financial incentives? UK family doctors and the GP fundholder scheme

The 1991 reforms to the UK NHS created a group of buyers of hospital care from amongst primary care physicians. The implementation of the reforms was such that these buyers had incentives to increase their use of hospital services prior to entering the scheme in order to inflate their budgets. It has been argued that non-financial motives would limit such behaviour. The paper shows that these h...

Do Financial Incentives Increase Doctors’ Willingness to Publish Research? – A Pilot Study of 21 Junior Doctors

The Effects of Budgets on Doctors Behaviour: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

In many health care systems primary care physicians act as ‘gatekeepers’ to secondary care. We investigates the impact of the UK fundholding scheme under which general practices could elect to hold a budget to meet the costs of elective surgery for their patients. We use a differences in differences methodology on a large four year panel of English general practices before and after the aboliti...

The Difficult Choice of “Not Doing”; Comment on “Quaternary Prevention, an Answer of Family Doctors to Overmedicalization”

The article of Marc Jamoulle shows the importance of the contribution of general practitioners (GPs) in improving the quality and the efficiency of the health systems. Starting from the concept of quaternary prevention for reducing excessive costs in the preventive procedures, he suggests a change of paradigm in every daily activity of the GP in order to have a stronger ethical approach to the ...

How do Doctors Respond to Incentives? Unintended Consequences of Paying Doctors to Reduce Costs

In an effort to find effective strategies for reducing healthcare costs, the Affordable Care Act has spent billions of dollars on pilot programs. In this paper, I study a Medicare pilot program in New Jersey where hospitals paid doctors bonuses for reducing the total costs of a given admission (a “bundled payment”). I identify the effects of the bonus by comparing the behavior of a given doctor...