The Effects of Copayments on Healthcare Utilization in Korea’s Medical Aid Program

Yong-Woo Lee and Lee Yong-Ju ()
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Lee Yong-Ju: School of Economics and Finance, Yeungnam University, 280 Daehak-ro, Gyeongsan38541, Korea (the Republic of)

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2019, vol. 19, issue 3, 17

Abstract: This study empirically tests the effects of the introduction of copayments on healthcare utilization in the Korea’s medical aid program (MAP). Due to a growing concern about overutilization of public healthcare and government’s financial burden, the Korean government reformed the MAP in 2007 and introduced copayments for outpatient care of Type 1 enrollees who had borne no medical treatment cost until the reform. Exploiting the natural experiment of 2007 reform, we perform a difference-in-differences (DID) analysis with propensity score matching and conclude that the introduction of copayments reduces healthcare utilization in the short-run through heterogeneous effect on the outpatient services consumption distribution, but this effect rapidly disappears over time.

Keywords: medical aid program; copayments; natural experiment; difference-in-differences; count data; quantile regressions; event study analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C50 C60 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2018-0345

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