Managed Care and Health Care Utilization: Specification of Bivariate Models Using Copulas

Peng Shi and Wei Zhang

North American Actuarial Journal, 2013, vol. 17, issue 4, 306-324

Abstract: This article studies the effect of managed care on health care utilization compared to traditional fee-for-service plans in private health insurance market. To construct our hypothesis, we build a game-theoretic model to study health care utilization under a two-sided moral hazard: of patients and providers. In econometric modeling, we employ a copula regression to jointly examine individuals’ health plan choice and their utilization of medical care services, because of the endogeneity of insurance choice. The dependence parameter in the copula reflects the relation between the two outcomes, based on which the average treatment effects are further derived. We apply the methodology to a survey data set of the U.S. population and consider three types of curative care and three types of preventive care for the measurement of medical care utilization. We find that managed care is in general associated with higher care utilization. Evidence is also found on the underlying incentives of both patients and medical providers.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10920277.2013.849192 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:uaajxx:v:17:y:2013:i:4:p:306-324

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uaaj20

DOI: 10.1080/10920277.2013.849192

Access Statistics for this article

North American Actuarial Journal is currently edited by Kathryn Baker

More articles in North American Actuarial Journal from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().