Ask Your Doctor or Pharmacist! On the Effect of Self-Dispensing Physicians on Pharmaceutical Coverage

Matthias Bannert () and David Iselin
Additional contact information
Matthias Bannert: KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

No 15-387, KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

Abstract: In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the eects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because Switzerland's federalist legislation allows us to study self-dispensing and non-self-dispensing regimes alike. We add location information obtained from Google Geocoding services to our dataset in order to measure coverage based on distances. To capture a driver of long term positioning decisions, we take revenues as a proxy for a pharmacy's usage rate. We nd that, ceteris paribus, self-dispensation leads to a lowered regional density of pharmacies. By matching similar pharmacies across both regimes we nd that revenues are substantially lower for pharmacies under a self-dispensation regime. Pharmacies in cantons that allow physicians to dispense drugs tend to have relatively higher revenues associated with non-drugs. We suggest to organize legislation on self-dispensation at a ne grained regional level as regional typologies are the most reasonable justication for regime choice.

Keywords: Pharmaceutical coverage; Drug dispensation; Self-dispensation; Health care expenditures; GIS; Propensity Score Matching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010479991 (application/pdf)

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:kof:wpskof:15-387

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KOF Working papers from KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().