http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hec.1478
pubmed: 19353529
scopus: 77949689197
Supplemental health insurance and equality of access in Belgium
April 2010
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The effects of supplemental health insurance on health-care consumption crucially depend on specific institutional features of the health-care system. We analyse the situation in Belgium, a country with a very broad coverage in compulsory social health insurance and where supplemental insurance mainly refers to extra-billing in hospitals. Within this institutional background, we find only weak evidence of adverse selection in the coverage of supplemental health insurance. We find much stronger effects of socio-economic background. We estimate a bivariate probit model and cannot reject the assumption of exogeneity of insurance availability for the explanation of health-care use. A count model for hospital care shows that supplemental insurance has no significant effect on the number of spells, but a negative effect on the number of nights per spell. We comment on the implications of our findings for equality of access to health care in Belgium. Copyright
- Moral hazard
- Adverse selection
- Healthcare use
- Equality of access
- Hospital spells
- Supplemental insurance
- health
- insurance
- model
- number
- effect
- hospital
- health insurance
- night
- result
- variable
- system
- belgium
- table
- health care use
- health care consumption
- information
- economic
- patient
- coverage
- probit
