Date and Time
November 5, 2008
3:15 PM - 5:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Dr. Francesco Paolucci - Research Fellow at the Australian National University, Adjunct Lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: Since January 1, 2006 the Health Insurance Act obliges each person who legally lives or works in the Netherlands to buy individual private health insurance with a legally described benefits package (e.g. physician services, prescribed pharmaceuticals and hospital care) from a private insurance company.

In an international context the Netherlands' health system reform is unique: it is the first country in the world that is consistently implementing Enthoven's (1978) model of Managed Competition: a ‘National Health Insurance based on Managed Competition in the PrivateSector'. In this seminar, Dr. Paolucci will discuss the main features and rationales of the Managed Competition model, its implementation in the Netherlands and its relevance for health care financing reforms in other countries (e.g. Australia and the United States).

Dr. Francesco Paolucci is a health economist and Research Fellow at ACERH (ANU). Prior to taking up his current post in 2007, he worked for five years as a researcher at the Institute of Health Policy and Management, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, where he wrote his PhD thesis entitled "The design of basic and supplementary health care financing schemes: implications for efficiency and affordability", under the supervision of Prof. W.P.M.M. van de Ven and Prof. F.T. Schut. His previous and current appointments are: Assistant-Director of the European Master in Law and Economics at University of Bologna; Assistant-Director of the Master in Health Economics, Policy and Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam; Coordinator of the course in "Competition policy in the health care sector" at Erasmus University Rotterdam; and Member of the iHEA Scientific Committee.

Topics of his recent studies and academic interests include:

• Health Insurance
• Regulated Competition
• Risk-equalisation
• Risk-selection
• International Comparison of Health Care Financing Schemes
• Economic analysis of competition law (eg. EC-law) in health care (insurance) markets

He is currently working with ACERH colleagues on the economic analysis of regulation in the Australian voluntary health insurance market with a particular focus on the risk-equalisation system. In April 2007, the Australian Government introduced a risk-equalisation system (previously called a reinsurance system). With risk-equalisation, insurers receive risk-adjusted payments reflecting the health risk profile of their clients as closely as possible to avoid risk-selection. The research in this area focuses on the following questions:

1. How can the system of risk-adjusted payments be improved in Australia?
2. Which are the optimal regulatory tools that the government can adopt to discourage risk selection?