REGULATED COMPETITION IN HEALTH-CARE - WITH OR WITHOUT A GLOBAL BUDGET

A major dilemma with respect to market-oriented health care reforms is that politicians strongly focus on cost containment in the sense of stabilizing the fraction of gross national product to be spent on health care. However, we can not exclude the option that more competition will yield higher total health care costs. This might induce politicians to put a global budget on health care expenditures. In this paper we focus on the question whether regulated competition in health care should (not) be combined with a global budget.