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广延边际与集约边际上的财务激励与私人医疗保险需求

Financial incentives and private health insurance demand on the extensive and intensive margins
Journal of Health Economics · 2024 · Kettlewell, Nathan、Zhang, Yuting

中文摘要

在公私双轨医疗体系并存的国家,个人往往通过补贴与惩罚机制获得购买私人医疗保险的激励。我们利用澳大利亚的行政数据,研究高收入人群在集约边际与广延边际上如何对保费补贴的同时取消与税收惩罚的提高作出反应。我们利用惩罚率与补贴率的不连续变化来估计断点回归模型。我们的研究情境尤为有趣,因为家计调查在广延边际与集约边际上产生了不同的激励。具体而言,我们可以预期观察到保险参保率上升的同时向更便宜计划的降级。我们发现,惩罚——尽管金额很大——对参保仅有适度的影响。我们的结果几乎没有发现降级的证据,这与我们所研究的高收入人群价格弹性较低相一致。

Abstract

In countries with dual public and private healthcare systems, individuals are often incentivized to purchase private health insurance through subsidies and penalty. We use administrative data from Australia to study how high-income earners respond on both the intensive and extensive margins to the simultaneous withdrawal of a premium subsidy, and the increase of a tax penalty. We estimate regression discontinuity models by exploiting discontinuous changes in the penalty and subsidy rates. Our setting is particularly interesting because means testing creates different incentives at the extensive and intensive margins. Specifically, we could expect to see higher take-up of insurance coupled with downgrading to less expensive plans. We find evidence that the penalty – despite being large in value – only has a modest effect on take-up. Our results show little evidence of downgrading, which is consistent with a low price elasticity for the high-income earners we study.
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