Modeling dental service use among the elderly in the presence of endogenous selection into dental coverage

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Project Summary The goal of this project is to provide a better understanding of the dental health and utilization consequences of changing economic and social health policies and how to improve the quality of life and health outcomes among the elderly by applying contemporary health services and econometric research methods. Our findings will assist policy makers as they formulate suitable governmental policies, including those that relate to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicare and Medicaid. This project is a collaborative effort of a multidisciplinary research team and will be conducted using MEPS data available from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The central hypothesis guiding this study is that preventive dental care is highly correlated with better-than- average general health and lower levels of comorbidity and utilization of medical services. This proposed project builds upon, and is an extension of, several collaborative studies previously conducted by this research team. We propose in this project to use multiple years of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to determine socio-economic and demographic characteristics of persons age 65 and older using preventive dental care compared to those using either no dental care, or only basic or major restorative services. We will then jointly estimate the probability of preventive dental care and both basic and major restorative dental services with the multiple years of MEPS data by using a correlated random effects panel data econometric method that controls for endogenous out-of pocket prices, coverage, and other control variables.