Patient Cost-Sharing and Healthcare Utilization in Early Childhood: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
2015/01/16
研討會日期 : 2015-01-16
時間 : 11:00
主講人 : Mr. Tzu-Ting Yang
主持人 : Professor Yu-Chin Hsu
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Mr. Tzu-Ting Yang will receive his Ph.D. in Economics from University of British Columbia in 2015. His research fields are Public Economics, Health Economics, Labour Economics, and Applied Econometrics. He is applying for a position of the Institute of Economics, AS now.
演講摘要 : Healthcare for young children is highly subsidized in many public health insurance programs around the world. However, the existing literature fails to provide sufficient evidence on how the demand for young children's healthcare reacts to these medical subsidy policies. This paper exploits a sharp increase in patient cost sharing – the share of healthcare costs the patient must pay out of their own pocket - at age 3 in Taiwan, resulting from young children “aging out" of the cost-sharing subsidy. This price shock on the 3rd birthday allows us to use a regression discontinuity design to examine the causal effect of cost sharing on the demand for young children's healthcare by comparing the utilization of healthcare for young children right before and right after their 3rd birthday. Our results show that the increase in the level of patient cost sharing at the 3rd birthday significantly reduces total outpatient expenditure. The implied price elasticity of outpatient expenditure is around -0.10. However, the demand for inpatient care for young children does not respond to a change in cost sharing at the 3rd birthday even though the price variation is much larger. This result implies that full coverage of inpatient care could improve the welfare of young children.
