Socioeconomic inequalities in waiting times for planned and cancer surgery: Evidence from Spain.

Waiting times act as a non-price rationing mechanism to bring together the demand for and the supply of public healthcare services and ensure equal access independently of ability to pay. This study tests for the presence of socioeconomic inequalities in waiting times for ten publicly-funded planned and cancer surgeries in Catalonia (Spain) in 2015-2019. Socioeconomic status (SES), measured by four categories (very low, low, middle, high), is based on co-payment levels for medicines which depend on patient's income.

The association between bed occupancy rates and hospital quality in the English National Health Service.

We study whether hospitals that exhibit systematically higher bed occupancy rates are associated with lower quality in England over 2010/11-2017/18. We develop an economic conceptual framework to guide our empirical analysis and run regressions to inform possible policy interventions. First, we run a pooled OLS regression to test if high bed occupancy is associated with, and therefore acts as a signal of, lower quality, which could trigger additional regulation.