Consumer Preferences for Health Services Offered by Health Insurance Companies in Germany

Raphael Schilling (), Milena Pavlova () and Andrea Karaman
Additional contact information
Raphael Schilling: Department of Health Services Research, CAPHRI, Maastricht University Medical Center, Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 Maastricht, The Netherlands
Milena Pavlova: Department of Health Services Research, CAPHRI, Maastricht University Medical Center, Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 Maastricht, The Netherlands
Andrea Karaman: Deloitte Consulting GmbH, 40476 Düsseldorf, Germany

Risks, 2023, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-27

Abstract: German health insurance companies increasingly strive to position themselves as health partners to their customers to improve customers’ health and contain costs. However, there is uncertainty about customers’ preferences for health services offered by health insurance companies. Therefore, this paper studies consumer preferences for health services that are or could be provided by health insurance companies in Germany. An online survey was conducted using two stated preference techniques to collect and analyze the data (namely, rating and ranking of health services considered by insurance companies). A sample of 880 German health insurance customers between 18 and 65 years old filled out the online questionnaire, of which 860 submitted complete responses. Ordinal logistic regression analysis was used for the rating and ranking. Preliminary examinations, care management, and health programs were the three health services most important to the respondents. The results suggest that people want their health insurance to support them with preventive health services that offer direct therapeutic value and not just informational, economic, access-related, or convenience-related benefits. These preferences for health services are homogeneous for most subgroups of the population, implying that health insurance companies could consider an overall strategy to address these preferences for all clients by focusing on the important health services.

Keywords: consumer preferences; health services; rating; ranking; Germany; health insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C G0 G1 G2 G3 K2 M2 M4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/11/12/216/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9091/11/12/216/ (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:gam:jrisks:v:11:y:2023:i:12:p:216-:d:1298799

Access Statistics for this article

Risks is currently edited by Mr. Claude Zhang

More articles in Risks from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().