Does Full Insurance Increase the Demand for Health Care?

Stefan Boes and Michael Gerfin ()
Additional contact information
Michael Gerfin: University of Bern

No 7689, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We estimate the causal effect of having full health insurance on health care expenditures. We take advantage of a unique quasi-experimental setup in which deductibles and co-payments were zero in a managed care plan, and non-zero in regular insurance, until a policy change forced all individuals with an active plan to cover a minimum amount of their expenses. Using panel data and a non-linear difference-in-differences strategy, we find a demand elasticity of about -0.14 comparing full insurance with the cost-sharing model, and a significant upward shift in the likelihood to generate costs.

Keywords: quasi experiment; health cost; deductibles; changes-in-changes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 I11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Health Economics, 2016, 25 (11), 1483-1496

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7689.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Full Insurance Increase the Demand for Health Care? (2016)
Working Paper: Does full insurance increase the demand for health care? (2013)
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:iza:izadps:dp7689

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().