Double Coverage and Health Care Demand: Evidence from Quantile Regression

Mestrado em Econometria Aplicada e PrevisãoThis paper examines the impact of double health insurance coverage on the demand for health care services, focusing on the effect of special public and private protection schemes (designated as health subsystems) beyond the statutory National Health Service Data from the last Portuguese Health Survey is used to estimate the effects of double insurance on the consumption of doctor visits. The novelty of this work is that within the context of count data modelling, the analysis is made for the whole distribution, not only for the location of the conditional distribution. Results indicate that ex-post moral hazard is present in all distribution for both public and private subsystems' beneficiaries but with greater magnitude in the latter group. Quantile regression for counts shows that double coverage from such health subsystems causes moral hazard effects that decrease for high levels of usage