• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.125-148
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• 2011

Although the patient's problem with access to health information has been improved due to rapidly developing information technologies, such as the internet, some patients still do not have enough ability to understand, interpret, and analyze the health information. Given this view on the patient's asymmetric information problem, if a doctor provides sufficient effort to help patients understand and interpret medical information, the efficiency of patient's medical care use could be improved. This paper shows firstly that the patient's inefficient use of medical care originates from his information problems, such as the misperception of the effectiveness of medical care and secondly suggests that if the doctor makes sufficient effort to correct patient's information problems, the inefficiency can be ameliorated. This paper also suggests the manipulation of a doctor's payment method can lead a doctor to provide optimal level of efforts which can in turn lead patients to use the optimal level of medical care. With an optimal level of effort, a doctor can more easily achieve a patient's compliance with the newly recommended amount of medical care.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.48-74
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• 2004

Considering the existence of asymmetric information between doctor and patient, the doctor's reimbursement method has been considered as a desirable policy device of improving efficiency of patient's use of medical care in terms of its affecting doctor's practice pattern by determining doctor's practice revenue. By using the Community Tracking Study (CTS) physician data set, which includes not only various information on doctors practice arrangements and sources of practice revenue, but also vignettes of various clinical presentations, this paper investigates doctor's reaction to the financial incentive under the control of patient's specific medical situation. Under the econometric model for exploring the effect of doctor's reimbursement method on his/her practice patterns; referring patients, recommend doctor-visit or medical tests, the Hausman's specification test was used for checking out the possibility of the doctor's reimbursement method being endogeneized explanatory variable. In the case where the endogeneity problem of doctor's reimbursement method exists, the 2SLS method was used for correcting that problem, and the multiple regression method was used in the case where the problem is found to be nonexistent. Based on the empirical results, this paper finds that doctors do appear to respond to financial incentive. The empirical results show that the doctor's reimbursement method statistically significantly affects doctor's practice pattern and are coincident with the theoretical result proposed by previous researches, This results suggest, as doctor's practice revenues are mainly determined by prospective method, such as capitation, doctors would more refer their patients to specialists, and hesitate in recommending doctor-visit or medical exam.