Patient payments and the empirical analysis of consumer demand for hospital services: An application for Bulgaria

Elka Atanasova (), Milena Pavlova, Emanuela Moutafova, Todorka Kostadinova and Wim Groot
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Elka Atanasova: Medical University Department of Health Economics and Management, Faculty of Public Health Varna Bulgaria
Emanuela Moutafova: Medical University Department of Health Economics and Management, Faculty of Public Health Varna Bulgaria
Todorka Kostadinova: Medical University Department of Health Economics and Management, Faculty of Public Health Varna Bulgaria
Wim Groot: Maastricht University Department of Health Services Research, CAPHRI, Maastricht University Medical Center, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences Maastricht The Netherlands

Society and Economy, 2012, vol. 34, issue 2, 313-338

Abstract: The implementation or amendment of patient charges in a country could benefit from preliminary analyses of their potential effects on health care demand. This paper focuses on hospital care. The paper aims to identify strategies for the empirical analysis of the demand for hospital services that are useful for the assessment of patient charges in the hospital sector, and to compare these strategies using empirical data for Bulgaria. The data were collected in 2010 in a representative survey among consumers. We apply both revealed- and stated-preference approaches. Within the framework of revealed preferences, we use data on various types of patient payments (total payments, formal payments and informal payments) as dependent variables to define three empirical models. Within the framework of stated preferences, we use data on stated willingness to pay for a hospitalization for different sub-samples (current users, users and all respondents), which also results in three empirical models. We observe some similarities and differences between the models based on stated-preference data and those based on revealed-preference data. Although our findings need to be studied further to establish how rigorous they are, they can be useful for setting up new studies on the convergent validity of the two approaches.

Keywords: demand models; willingness-to-pay; patient payments; hospital services; Bulgaria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
Note: The study is financed by the European Commission under FP7 Theme 8 Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities, Project ASSPRO CEE 2007 (GA no. 217431). The content of the publication is the sole responsibility of the authors and it in no way represents the views of the Commission or its services. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments on our paper.
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