Are high medical costs incurred by people with disabilities excessive?: An empirical analysis of Korean National Health Insurance Data

Min Jung Hong, Changwoo Lee, Clara Lee, Ye-Soon Kim, Jae Yeon Jeong, Junha Park, Dong Wook Shin and Euichul Shin

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: A crude comparison of medical costs between people with disabilities (PWD) and without disabilities (PWoD) shows a much higher expenditure among PWD and such results have been a cause for further stigmatization. This study aims to empirically analyze whether the medical costs for PWD are actually high when characteristics related to medical costs are adjusted. Ten percent of the total population was randomly selected from the Korean National Health Insurance (NHI) Database in 2016. A crude comparative analysis was performed to calculate the medical cost of PWD and PWoD. A subsequent multiple regression analysis was conducted to adjust factors affecting the medical costs such as socioeconomic status, disease, and health behavior-related characteristics. The medical cost for PWD was 3.6 times higher than that for PWoD by crude comparison. However, after multiple regression analysis, margin of difference decreased to 1.5 times although the cost for PWD remained higher. Substantial decrease in higher medical costs for PWD after multiple analyses compared to crude analysis implies that additional adjustment using variables such as disease severity, not available in the NHI database, may predict a further reduction in differences. Thus, it is difficult to determine that the medical expenditure for PWD is excessive.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0262653 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 62653&type=printable (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:plo:pone00:0262653

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262653

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().