Estimating healthcare expenditures after becoming divorced or widowed using propensity score matching

Iris Meulman (), Bette Loef, Niek Stadhouders, Tron Anders Moger, Albert Wong, Johan J. Polder and Ellen Uiters
Additional contact information
Iris Meulman: National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Bette Loef: National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Niek Stadhouders: Radboud University Medical Center
Tron Anders Moger: University of Oslo
Albert Wong: National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Johan J. Polder: National Institute for Public Health and the Environment
Ellen Uiters: National Institute for Public Health and the Environment

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2023, vol. 24, issue 7, No 4, 1047-1060

Abstract: Abstract Becoming divorced or widowed are stressful life events experienced by a substantial part of the population. While marital status is a significant predictor in many studies on healthcare expenditures, effects of a change in marital status, specifically becoming divorced or widowed, are less investigated. This study combines individual health claims data and registered sociodemographic characteristics from all Dutch inhabitants (about 17 million) to estimate the differences in healthcare expenditure for individuals whose marital status changed (n = 469,901) compared to individuals who remained married, using propensity score matching and generalized linear models. We found that individuals who were (long-term) divorced or widowed had 12–27% higher healthcare expenditures (RR = 1.12, 95% CI 1.11–1.14; RR = 1.27, 95% CI 1.26–1.29) than individuals who remained married. Foremost, this could be attributed to higher spending on mental healthcare and home care. Higher healthcare expenditures are observed for both divorced and widowed individuals, both recently and long-term divorced/widowed individuals, and across all age groups, income levels and educational levels.

Keywords: Divorce; Healthcare expenditure; Healthcare utilization; Marital status change; Propensity score matching; Widowhood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10198-022-01532-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:eujhec:v:24:y:2023:i:7:d:10.1007_s10198-022-01532-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-022-01532-z

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().