Can Regional Decentralisation Shift Health Care Preferences?

Joan Costa-Font and Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell

No 11180, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Uniform health care delivered by a mainstream public insurer – such as the National Health Service (NHS), seldom satisfies heterogeneous demands for care, and some unsatisfied share of the population either use private health care, or purchase private insurance (PHI). One potential mechanism to partially satisfy heterogeneous preferences for health care, and discourage the use of private health care, is regional health care decentralisation. We find robust estimates suggesting that the development of regional health services shifted both perceptions of, and preferences for, using the NHS, making it more likely individuals would use public health care and, consequently, reducing the uptake of PHI. These results are heterogeneous by income, education, and age groups; and are robust to placebo and other robustness and falsification checks.

Keywords: National Health Service (NHS); political decentralization; use of private health care; private health insurance; health system satisfaction; demand for private health care (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H7 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published as 'Does Devolution Influence the Choice and Quality of Public (vs Private) Health Care?' in: Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organisation , 2022, 202, 632-653

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11180.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Can Regional Decentralisation Shift Health Care Preferences? (2017)
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:iza:izadps:dp11180

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().