Heterogeneous effect of coinsurance rate on the demand for health care: a finite mixture approach

Galina Besstremyannaya ()
Additional contact information
Galina Besstremyannaya: CEFIR

No w0163, Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR)

Abstract: The paper exploits finite mixture (latent class) models to account for consumer heterogeneity in estimating the effect of coinsurance rate on the demand for health care. The parametric analysis employs a two-part model, a Tobit model, and generalized linear models with latent classes. The non-parametric analysis uses matching estimators in each latent class to construct a control group of consumers and measure the average treatment effect of the natural experiment with a rise in nominal coinsurance rate. The paper exploits the 2000-2008 data of the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers and the 2008 data of Japan Household Panel Survey. The estimations demonstrate a significant negative effect of nominal coinsurance rate on the demand for health care. The effect is primarily noticeable in the latent class of consumers with high health care demand, who constitute 21% of the sample. Our finding with the latent class models with Japanese data, where the assignment of insurance plans is exogenous, is similar to the results with the RAND Health Insurance Experiment data, where the assignment was randomized.

Keywords: Health insurance; coinsurance rate; panel data latent class model; average treatment effect; price elasticity; matching estimators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G22 I10 I18 R22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cefir.ru/papers/WP163_2012.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.cefir.ru/papers/WP163_2012.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://www.nes.ru/files/Preprints-resh/WP163_2012.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cfr:cefirw:w0163

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Babich ().