 The effect of housing wealth on health care spendingMichael F. Lovenheim and Jun Hyun Yun Journal of Health Economics, 2025, vol. 103, issue C Abstract: The U.S. healthcare system requires substantial out-of-pocket payments by most consumers, which can prevent some from receiving needed medical services. At the same time, housing wealth comprises a significant proportion of household wealth that could be used to pay for medical care. We analyze the effects of housing wealth on out-of-pocket medical expenditures among older homeowners. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study and various measures of home price changes, we find no evidence that housing wealth impacts out-of-pocket medical spending. The estimates are universally small and precise, allowing us to rule out even modest-sized effects. Effects are zero across the expenditure distribution, for specific categories of expenditure, and for different types of homeowners split by health insurance status and SES. We present suggestive evidence that our results represent a mix of homeowners not needing to access their housing wealth for additional medical care and being unwilling or unable to access their home equity. Keywords: Housing wealth; Medical spending; Elderly (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:103:y:2025:i:c:s0167629625000542 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2025.103019 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier |
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