Public health care providers and market competition: the case of Finnish occupational health services

Background  

As reforms in publicly funded health systems rely heavily on competition, it is important to know if and how public providers react to competition. In many European countries, it is empirically difficult to study public providers in different markets, but in Finnish occupational health services, both public and private for-profit and non-profit providers co-exist. We studied possible differences in public providers’ performance (price, intensity of services, service mix—curative medical services/prevention, productivity and revenues) according to the competitiveness of the market.