The effect of variable health insurance deductibles on the demand for physician visits
The effect of variable health insurance deductibles on the demand for physician visits
复制标题
DOI：
10.1002/hec.630
复制
发表时间：
2001-07-01
期刊：
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
Schellhorn, M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Schellhorn, M
为了控制医疗保健部门的成本，许多国家都提出并实现了在医疗保险中引入消费者激励措施。1996年的瑞士保健制度改革在强制性基本健康保险中引入了保健服务免赔额的选择。本文估计了这一选择对医生服务利用的影响。应用广义矩方法(GMM)估计器，在估计就诊次数时考虑了免赔额选择的内生性。本文发现，在选择较高免赔额的个人中，所观察到的就医次数的大部分减少似乎是个人在各自的保险合同中自我选择的结果，而不是由于使用行为的诱导变化。版权所有(C)2001 John Wiley&Sons，Ltd.
In order to contain cost in the health care sector, the introduction of consumer incentives in health insurance has been suggested and realized in many countries. The Swiss health system reform of 1996 introduced a choice of deductible for health services in the mandatory basic health insurance. This paper estimates the effect of this choice on physician service utilization. A generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator is applied to take account of the endogeneity of the choice of the deductible in the estimation of the number of physician visits. This paper finds that most of the observed reduction in the number of physician visits among individuals who choose a higher deductible seems to be a result of self-selection of individuals into the respective insurance contracts, and not to induced changes in utilization behaviour. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.