Does Health Insurance Always Increase Health Care Demand? Evidence on Distributional Effects from Inpatient Hospital Stays
نویسندگان
چکیده
In quantifying the impact of insurance on health care demand, most quasiexperimental studies focus on mean spending and consumption, which, considering the highly-skewed shapes of spending and consumption, potentially hides important information about how insurance is related to health care demand. This paper, by contrast, examines the entire distribution of health care demand. To address insurance endogeneity, the paper focuses on inpatient hospital stays resulting from an emergency event. The main finding is that lacking insurance seems to hinder inpatient spending only for relatively lightspending stays. By contrast, for heavy-spending stays, which are presumably more serious medically, lacking insurance does not appear to hinder spending. JEL Codes: I13, C21
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