Co-Payments for Prescription Drugs and the Demand for Doctor Visits - Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Rainer Winkelmann

No 307, SOI - Working Papers from Socioeconomic Institute - University of Zurich

Abstract: The German health care reform of 1997 provides a natural experiment for evaluating the price sensitivity of demand for physicians� services. As part of the reform, copayments for prescription drugs were increased by up to 200 percent. However, certain groups of people were exempted from the increase, providing a natural control group against which the changed demand for physicians� services of the treated, those subject to increased co-payments, can be assessed. The differences-in-differences estimates indicate that increased co-payments reduced the number of doctor visits by about 10 percent on average.

Keywords: co-payment; moral hazard; count data; Poisson regression; differences-indifferences model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2003-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Health Economics 13, 2004, pages 1081-1089

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https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52179/1/wp0307.pdf First version, 2003 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:soz:wpaper:0307

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