Co-payment exemption and healthcare consumption. Quasi-experimental evidence from Italy

Vanessa Cirulli, Giuliano Resce () and Marco Ventura

No 203, Working Papers in Public Economics from Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Roma

Abstract: This paper investigates the causal effect of co-payment exemption on the utilization of healthcare services with a particular emphasis on the number of specialist visits in the Italian National Health System (NHS). As the co-payment exemption may be considered as a sort of insurance, a relevant research question is to ask whether such a protection has had any effect on healthcare services utilization. Exploiting a discontinuity in the multiple eligibility criteria for co-payment exemption, we apply Multiple Regression Discontinuity (MRD) in a quasi-experimental setting, considering both age and income requirements.This discontinuity also allows us to identify the effect of co-payment on a particularly fragile sub-population of less wealthy people. Our findings provide convincing evidence of a positive and significant effect of co-payment exemption on the number of specialist visits. The result may be useful to the policy maker to tailor ad-hoc policies aimed at disadvantaged sub-populations.

Keywords: Healthcare; Co-payment; Demand effects; Multiple Regression Discontinuity; National Health System (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I11 I14 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dipecodir.it/wpsap/data/wp203.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Co-payment exemption and healthcare consumption: quasi-experimental evidence from Italy (2024)
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:sap:wpaper:wp203

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Public Economics from Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Roma
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Luisa Giuriato ().