Cost-sharing in health insurance and its impact in a developing country– Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment

Ha Nguyen and Luke Connelly ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Though the impact of cost-sharing on health care demand is well documented in developed countries, evidence from developing countries is rare. This paper’s contribution is to analyse the impact of increasing coinsurance in a developing nation -Vietnam – by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in that country. In 2007, the Vietnam government reintroduced a 20 percent coinsurance for individuals who hold voluntary health insurance policies. As individuals with compulsory health insurance were exempt from this re-imposition of coinsurance, this policy change may be regarded as a quasi-natural experiment. To exploit this change, we use a difference-in-difference approach to examine whether the increase in coinsurance effectively reduced the demand for health care services among those affected. We find it has no statistically significant effect on the quantity of health care demanded. We however find that those who were under 18 or in low income households reduced their health care use after the increase in coinsurance. These findings hold – at least in the short-run, with a variety of different outcomes and estimators.

Keywords: Health insurance; Difference-in-difference; Cost-sharing; Developing country; Vietnam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G22 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/76399/1/MPRA_paper_76399.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Cost-sharing in health insurance and its impact in a developing country: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment (2017)
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:pra:mprapa:76399

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().