Abstract

As the financial situation of the health care system in Austria is an important issue, a dynamic model of receipts and expenditures of public health insurance can give important insights on possible future behaviour and outcome of various policies. Therefore a model is developed using the method System Dynamics (as defined by Jay W. Forrester) and for implementation the software Vensim. Based on a dynamic population model, global income and expenses are simulated, where the income results mainly from contributions and expenses come from medical attendance and prescribed drugs, which are calculated from occurring illnesses. After introducing the structure of the underlying social insurance system in Austria, the model structure in detail and the implementation of the demographic population part are explained. Policy and scenario testing can be done very easily with such a model structure.