 Does seeing the doctor more often keep you out of the hospital?Robert Kaestner and Anthony T. Lo Sasso Journal of Health Economics, 2015, vol. 39, issue C, 259-272 Abstract: By exploiting a unique health insurance benefit design, we provide novel evidence on the causal association between outpatient and inpatient care. Our results indicate that greater outpatient spending was associated with more hospital admissions: a $100 increase in outpatient spending was associated with a 1.9% increase in the probability of having an inpatient event and a 4.6% increase in inpatient spending among enrollees in our sample. Moreover, we present evidence that the increase in hospital admissions associated with greater outpatient spending was for conditions in which it is plausible to argue that the physician and patient could exercise discretion. Keywords: High deductible health insurance; Consumer-driven health insurance; Inpatient care; Outpatient care; Health reimbursement arrangement; Health insurance plan design (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:39:y:2015:i:c:p:259-272 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2014.08.003 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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