Collaboration and competition policy in a market-based hospital system: a case-study from The Netherlands

In the Dutch healthcare system, provider competition is used as a tool to improve efficiency. From a competition policy perspective, little is known about how collaboration among healthcare providers contributes to overall patient welfare, and how a balance is achieved between scale benefits and preventing anticompetitive collusion. This paper examines the ex-post effects of a Dutch case study in which three competing hospitals have collaborated to provide highcomplexity low-volume cancer surgery, an arrangement that tests the limits of permissibility under the Dutch cartel prohibition. Our pr... Mehr ...