Does the Pension Program Affect Health Care Utilization of Elderly Farmers? Evidence from the Old Farmer Pension Program in Taiwan
2019/06/11
研討會日期 : 2019-06-11
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Feng-An Yang (楊豐安)
主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Yang received his Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics from Ohio State University. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Agricultural Economics, National Taiwan University. His research fields are Policy Analysis, Applied Econometrics, and Health Economics.
演講摘要 : This paper investigates the impact of the pension program on health care utilization of elderly farmers. We use the Old Farmer Pension program in Taiwan as an illustration. Using an administrative medical claims dataset drawn from the National Health Insurance program between 2002 and 2012, and a regression discontinuity design exploiting the abrupt change in pension eligibility at age 65, we find that the pension program has a modest positive impact on health care utilization and expenditures. Furthermore, this impact is driven by outpatient services but not inpatient services and prescription drugs. Our estimates show that this program significantly increases elderly farmers’ outpatient utilization and expenditures by 6% and 3%, respectively. By further looking at the syndromes, we find that the program effect on outpatient services is heterogenous across medical specialty. It is more pronounced for family medicine, internal medicine, Chinese medicine, and ophthalmology.
