INVESTIGADORES
MOSCOSO Nebel Silvana
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Asymmetric information in hospital services
Autor/es:
MOSCOSO NEBEL - TOHMÉ FERNANDO
Lugar:
Buenos Aires
Reunión:
Jornada; XXXVI Reunión Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Economía Política (AAEP); 2001
Institución organizadora:
Asociación Argentina de Economía Política - CEMA
Resumen:
Hospital services are in general offered in big structures equipped with high technology and well-trained human resources. That framework provides not only for hospital services but also for ambulatory practices. Funding for its maintenance, which is usually costly, comes from both the private and the public health sector. In fact hospital services may be provided either by the private or the public sector. The first case is that of private hospitals whose objective is to obtain the maximum economic benefit. In the second case, that of the public sector, the goal is exclusively to provide services of health care, without a major concern for profit. The demand for these services comes from patients with or without health insurance. Therefore those patients that are not insured, and have not enough resources to cover the fees at private hospitals, attend instead the public hospitals.- Beyond this, rather obvious, difference between public and private hospitals, there exists a subtler difference. The pattern of behavior of the medical personnel differs in both types of institution. We claim that this is a direct consequence of the asymmetry of information between physicians and patients.  Since a patient has less information about her condition than the doctor, she has to delegate in the physician the task of restoring her health.  In the terminology of economics, the patient plays the role of the “principal” while the doctor that of the “agent”. As it has been extensively studied, this principal-agent relation is a source of incentives for the agent to behave strategically. Therefore it seems convenient to analyze these incentives to explain why the behavior of the physicians in each kind of hospital.- This paper has three parts. The first part describes the provision of health services in public hospitals and the consequences of the principal-agent problem that arises in those institutions. The second part performs the same analysis for private hospitals, showing that the consequences are rather different. Finally, the third part of the paper compares the consequences of the informational asymmetry between doctors and patients in the public and private sector and some possible measures to counteract its effects.-