Who joins the network? Physicians' resistance to take budgetary co-responsibility.

Managed Care (MC) is expected to provide health care at a lower cost than conventional provision. Therefore, Switzerland intends to promote MC by forcing health insurers to write MC contracts and introducing budgetary co-responsibility for ambulatory care physicians. A discrete choice experiment conducted in 2011 including 872 physicians reveals a strong preference heterogeneity with respect to network participation and alternative remuneration schemes.

Lead me not into temptation: drug price regulation and dispensing physicians in Switzerland.

While most countries separate drug prescription and dispensation to ensure independent drug choice, some allow this combination to increase pharmaceutical access in rural areas or to increase the utilization of pharmacist skills. A drawback of this approach is that dispensing physicians or prescribing pharmacists may be incentivized to increase their own profits through the prescription of cost-inefficient drug packages, leading to an increase in pharmaceutical spending. Switzerland constitutes an interesting example of where dispensing and non-dispensing physicians coexist, permitting a comparison of their prescribing behavior.

Generic substitution, financial interests, and imperfect agency.

Policy makers around the world seek to encourage generic substitution. In this paper, the importance of prescribing physicians' imperfect agency is tested using the fact that some Swiss jurisdictions allow physicians to dispense drugs on their own account (physician dispensing, PD) while others disallow it. We estimate a model of physician drug choice with the help of drug claim data, finding a significant positive association between PD and the use of generics.

What do physicians dislike about managed care? Evidence from a choice experiment.

Managed care (MC) imposes restrictions on physician behavior, but also holds promises, especially in terms of cost savings and improvements in treatment quality. This contribution reports on private-practice physicians' willingness to accept (WTA, compensation asked, respectively) for several MC features. In 2011, 1,088 Swiss ambulatory care physicians participated in a discrete choice experiment, which permits putting WTA values on MC attributes.