Multiple Pricing for Health Care Services

This paper provides a theoretical model that captures the essential features of a Swedish health care reform where private and public health care providers serve patients with certain functional impairments, but where only private providers can reject service requests from patients. Since the hourly price compensation is fixed, this type of systems is expected to result in a monetary deficit for public providers (since they can not reject proposals from “unprofitable” patients). This paper proposes a more advanced pricing system and characterizes its optimal solution. A numerical analysis demonstrates that the deficit for the public provider can be substantially reduced without affecting the total budget.