Mandated checkups, knowledge of own health status, and chronic care utilization: The effect of HIV medical evaluation mandates on healthcare quality and expenditure in a US‐single payer system

Senay Topal, Patrick Richard, John Young, Anuradha Ganesan, Todd Gleeson, Jason Blaylock, Jason F. Okulicz, Xiuping Chu and Brian K. Agan

Health Economics, 2024, vol. 33, issue 1, 59-81

Abstract: In an effort to improve military readiness, in 2014 the US Air Force reduced the frequency of mandated HIV medical evaluation visits from every 6 months to every 12 months. We employ this natural experiment using data for 2676 active‐duty Military Health System beneficiaries living with HIV with a difference‐in‐differences empirical strategy using the Army, Navy, and Marines as a control group to estimate the causal effect of reducing the frequency of mandated evaluation visits on the quality and cost of medical care for active‐duty military members living with HIV. We find that reducing the frequency of mandated HIV medical evaluation visits reduced the likelihood of regular HIV visits by 23 percentage points but did not affect the likelihood of receiving other preventive care, adhering to HIV therapy, or maintaining viral testing and suppression. The study finds evidence that the recommended level of regular HIV visits may be higher than necessary. The reduction in regular HIV visits was not associated with a similar reduction in the studied quality of care measures, therefore, the effect of alleviating the mandate was overall positive in terms of reducing healthcare utilization without adversely affecting preventive care, HIV therapy, or viral testing and suppression.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4761

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:wly:hlthec:v:33:y:2024:i:1:p:59-81

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 ().