Industrial Organization in Health Care

The current Belgian health care system has good and bad characteristics. On one hand, the Belgian health care provision is of high quality and one of the best in the world. On the other hand, the financing scheme is far from optimal. In the Ph.D., I want to discuss policy changes that would solve the main problems of the Belgian health care financing scheme, while keeping all the advantages of the current system. An important change would be evolving to an optimal risk adjustment scheme instead of a conventional one. This will lead to several policy implications, which will improve social welfare. The idea is to acquire data about health care services provided in Belgium, which will allow me to revisit the Belgian risk adjustment scheme, and propose a better alternative. Another subject of the Ph.D. is to investigate how hospital mergers in the US affect hospital health care. The goal is to explain the causal relationship between mergers, quality, prices, profits, etc. I will do this by building a model and by using hospital production data and insurance claims data.