National Intelligence and Private Health Expenditure: Do High IQ Societies Spend More on Health Insurance?

Nik Ahmad Sufian Burhan (), Fauzilah Salleh and Nik Mohd Ghazi Burhan

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Studies show that high IQ people practice healthier lifestyles, which result in better health status. However, do such people spend more on healthcare? We employed hierarchical multiple regression analysis to examine the impact of national average IQ on private health expenditure, especially health insurance at cross-country level. Controlling for income, the old-age dependency ratio, and government expenditure on health, we found that IQ was positively significant on out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure but negatively associated with private health insurance expenditure. We suggest that high IQ societies pay less for health insurance because they are more capable of preventing illnesses or injuries and they live in healthier and safer environments, which are less vulnerable to diseases. In addition, they are more efficient at calculating risk and making choices according to their future healthcare needs. Hence, with price dispersion and various choices of premium schemes available within the health insurance industry, high IQ people may be more efficient at obtaining lower effective prices of premiums.

Keywords: health insurance; income; intelligence; national IQ; private health expenditure; public health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I13 I25 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-06-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77328/1/MPRA_paper_77328.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:77328

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 ().