Determinants of Health Care Decisions: Insurance, Utilization, and Expenditures

Chan Shen
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Chan Shen: Georgetown University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 1, 142-153

Abstract: This paper studies three interrelated health care decisions: insurance, utilization, and expenditures. The model treats insurance as an endogenous variable with respect to both utilization and expenditures, addresses potential selection issues, and takes into account that the decisions to use health care and the level of treatment are determined by different decision makers. We employ semiparametric methods to avoid making distributional assumptions. Using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 2005 data, the semiparametric approach predicts insurance to increase the level of expenditures by 48%, a number in accord with an important experimental study and less than half that obtained using parametric methods. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: health care insurance; health care expenditures; health care utilization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C31 C35 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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