Does Physician Dispensing Increase Drug Expenditures?

Christian Schmid Boris Kaiser
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christian Schmid and Boris Kaiser

Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft - CRED

Abstract: We analyze whether the possibility for physicians to dispense drugs increases health care expenditures due to the incentives created by the markup on drugs sold. Using comprehensive physician-level data from Switzerland, we exploit the fact that there is regional variation in the dispensing regime to estimate policy effects. The empirical strategy consists of doubly-robust estimation which combines inverseprobability weighting with regression. Our main finding suggests that if dispensing is permitted, physicians produce significantly higher drug costs in the order of 30% per patient.

Date: 2013-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.vwiit.ch/cred/CREDResearchPaper02.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Physician Dispensing Increase Drug Expenditures? (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:rdv:wpaper:credresearchpaper02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Diskussionsschriften from Universitaet Bern, Departement Volkswirtschaft - CRED Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Franz Koelliker ().