 Responses to Cost-Sharing: Do Socio-Demographic Characteristics Matter?Maud Hofland, Katalin Gaspar and Jan Boone No 19918, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: Patient cost-sharing in health insurance tends to reduce moral hazard, but the effect may differ between subgroups. For instance, one may expect low-income groups to react more strongly to cost-sharing than high incomes. With the help of a structural microsimulation model, we estimate the response to changes in cost-sharing across gender, age and income groups. We estimate the parameters of our model using Dutch individual-level healthcare data for the years 2011 to 2019. We find an overall average elasticity of approximately -0.11, with considerable variation in elasticities across age groups but only minimal variation across income quintiles or between genders. An increase in cost-sharing causes the largest increase in out-of-pocket expenditure for the elderly. Further, our calculations indicate that the rate of decrease in health care demand as a result of an increase in out-of-pocket payments is similar across all income quintiles. Consequently, our model does not support the notion that the current Dutch deductible represents a disproportionately large financial burden for low income groups. Keywords: Bayesian; mixture; model (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19918 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
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