Do Deductibles reduce Moral Hazard in the German Statutory Health Insurance? - Empirical Evidence

Stefanie Thönnes

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of participating in the optional tariff "Premium Refund", an implicit optional deductible tariff, on different measures of medical demand. Specifically, it analyzes whether participating in the tariff can reduce ex-post moral hazard. Therefore, I use panel data from a German company health insurance fund covering the years 2008 to 2012. In order to remove potential selection bias of healthy individuals selecting into the tariff, I match the group of participants with the group of nonparticipants by socioeconomic characteristics and baseline medical characteristics, amongst others. In addition, I combine matching with regression to make results more robust. I find that participating in the premium refund tariff significantly reduces the probability of visiting a general practitioner by 6 percentage points. However, the probability of visiting a doctor because of a trivial disease such as a common cold is not reduced. I conclude that there is evidence that participation in the tariff reduces medical demand. It remains unclear, though, whether this is due to a reduction in moral hazard or whether it is driven through some other channel.

JEL-codes: I11 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/112912/1/VfS_2015_pid_559.pdf (application/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:zbw:vfsc15:112912

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().