1. Asymmetric information and agency

• Overview of information issues
• Asymmetric information
• Application of the lemons principle: health insurance
• Agency relationships in health care
• Principal-agent problems in health care

2. Health insurance

• Risk and insurance
• The demand for insurance
• The supply of insurance
• The case of moral hazard
• Health insurance and the efficient allocation of resources
• Loading costs and the behaviour of insurance firms
• Employer-based health insurance and job mobility

3. Social health insurance 

• A taxonomy of health insurance
• Social health insurance policies and social programmes
• Historical roots of social health insurance
• The Bismarck, Semashko and Beveridge model
• Social health insurance in Europe and elsewhere
• Strengths and weaknesses of social health insurance financing in western Europe

4. Comparative health care systems and health system reforms 

• Contemporary health care systems
• National health programmes: several examples
• Differences in health care spending across countries
• The role of voluntary health insurance
• Health system reform in international perspective
• A conceptual framework for comparing health system reforms
• Three waves of health care reforms
• Dilemmas in health care policy

5. Theory and practice of regulated (managed) competition

• On the goals of health policy
• Equity and efficiency
• Market failure
• Tools sponsors can use to counteract market failure
• The technical complexities of regulated competition
• Regulated competition in practice

6. Towards competitive sickness fund markets in Europe

• Consumer choice of sickness funds
• A conceptual framework: How to combine solidarity and consumer choice of sickness funds?
• Risk adjustment
• Risk selection
• Consumer mobility
• A five country comparison

7. Hospital markets

• Economic characteristics of hospitals
• Heterogeneity of hospital care
• Effects of hospital competition on costs and quality
• Medical arms race

8. Hospital mergers and antitrust policy

• Economic rationale for antitrust policy
• Anticompetitive effects of hospital mergers
• The definition of geographic hospital markets
• Lessons from US and Dutch hospital merger cases?

9. Managed care

• What is managed care?
• History of managed care
• Managed care and market failure
• Empirical research on managed care
• Are managed care costs lower?
• Quality of care
• Economic issues related to the growth of managed care
• Managed care in Europe

10. Health Insurance and Reinsurance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

• Underlying limits to health insurance in low-income countries
• Community-based health schemes in low-income countries
• The role of reinsurance
• Regulating micro health insurance: what is different from other insurance?
• Health subsidies and subsidies for risk-pooling
• The Social Re approach to sustainable community health schemes
• Is Social Re a mechanism to adjust risk across insurers and share risk across insured?

11. Medical Savings Accounts

• What are MSAs?
• Theory and practice of MSAs

12. The complex interactions between basic and supplementary health insurance schemes: an international perspective.

See Course Website: http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/courses/course.asp?code=ECON8074

For further information please refer to http://ecocomm.anu.edu.au/courses/course.asp?code=ECON8074