EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The choice of detecting Down syndrome: does money matter?

Clémentine Garrouste, Jérôme Le and Eric Maurin

Health Economics, 2011, vol. 20, issue 9, 1073-1089

Abstract: The prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome (amniocentesis) presents parents with a complex dilemma which requires comparing the risk of giving birth to an affected child and the risk of losing an unaffected child through amniocentesis‐related miscarriage. Building on the specific features of the French Health insurance system, this paper shows that variation in the monetary costs of the diagnosis procedure may have a very significant impact on how parents solve this ethical dilemma. The French institutions make it possible to compare otherwise similar women facing very different reimbursement schemes and we find that eligibility to full reimbursement has a largely positive effect on the probability of taking an amniocentesis test. By contrast, the sole fact of being labelled ‘high‐risk’ by the Health system seems to have, as such, only a modest effect on subsequent choices. Finally, building on available information on post‐amniocentesis outcomes, we report new evidence suggesting that amniocentesis increases the risk of premature birth and low weight at birth. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.1762

Related works:
Working Paper: The choice of detecting Down syndrome: does money matter? (2011)
Working Paper: The choice of detecting Down syndrome: does money matter? (2011)
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:wly:hlthec:v:20:y:2011:i:9:p:1073-1089

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:20:y:2011:i:9:p:1073-1089