Do Hispanic immigrants spend less on medical care? Implications of the Hispanic health paradox

Subhasree Basu Roy, Reed Neil Olsen and Huikuan Tseng

Applied Economics, 2020, vol. 52, issue 36, 3951-3964

Abstract: The literature of the Hispanic heath paradox has found that in the U.S. Hispanic immigrants have better health than U.S. natives, even though they tend to have lower socioeconomic status. The main objective of the current study is to investigate whether Hispanic immigrants also use less medical care goods and services. Main contributions of the article include using a data set of older Americans from the Health and Retirement Study covering the period from 1992 to 2012 as well as using three new measures of health, rather than the more common use of morbidity or mortality. We estimate the impact of relevant factors including health, race, and immigrant status upon five different measures of healthcare usage. Even though Hispanic immigrants do have lower mean levels of most measures of healthcare usage, when controlling for other factors in our regressions we find some evidence of increased healthcare usage for Hispanic immigrants. Increased health care utilization may be one explanation for the Hispanic health paradox.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2020.1726863

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