The health conditions and the health care consumption of the uninsured

Marco A. Castaneda () and Meryem Saygili ()
Additional contact information
Marco A. Castaneda: The University of Texas at Tyler
Meryem Saygili: The University of Texas at Tyler

Health Economics Review, 2016, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: Abstract This paper investigates the difference in the health conditions and the health care consumption of uninsured individuals as compared to individuals with private insurance, using a nationally representative data set of inpatient hospital admissions from the US. In line with the previous literature, our results indicate that uninsured individuals are, on average, in worse health conditions. However, if we compare individuals within the same diagnosis category, the uninsured are actually healthier, with a lower number of chronic conditions and a lower risk of mortality. This indicates that the uninsured are admitted to the hospital only for more serious conditions. In addition, our results show that uninsured individuals consume less health care. In particular, conditional on being admitted to a hospital and controlling for health conditions, the uninsured have lower total charges, fewer procedures, and a higher mortality rate.

Keywords: Health insurance; Health conditions; Health care consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s13561-016-0137-z Abstract (text/html)

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:spr:hecrev:v:6:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1186_s13561-016-0137-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/13561

DOI: 10.1186/s13561-016-0137-z

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics Review is currently edited by J. Matthias Graf von der Schulenburg

More articles in Health Economics Review from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().