Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/102585 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
IES Working Paper No. 30/2012
Publisher: 
Charles University in Prague, Institute of Economic Studies (IES), Prague
Abstract: 
The paper estimates the effect of the abolition of user charges for outpatient care (30 CZK/1.2 EUR) in 2009 on the demand for ambulatory doctor visits in the Czech Republic. The r eform a pplied only to children, which enabled us to take the difference-in-differences approach. Children constitute a treatment group, whereas adults serve as a control group. Besides the treatment effect, we control also for a number of personal characteristics using a micro-level data (EU-SILC). We estimate two models: Multinomial logit (MNL) and Zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB). The effect of the abolition of user charges on the number of doctor visits proved insignificant suggesting that either the demand for this type of care is indeed inelastic, user charges were set too low or the people have not changed their behavior yet. On the contrary, we found that personal income, the number of household members and sex significantly influence the number of visits to the doctor. Two robustness checks using restricted samples confirms the results.
Subjects: 
co-payments
outpatient care
Czech Republic
natural experiment
Zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) model
Multinomial logit (MNL) model
JEL: 
D04
I18
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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