Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Do The Insured Make Greater Use Of Medical Services?, Gregg Girvan, Sven Wilson

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

Conventional wisdom states if policy-makers set the goal of increasing the number of patients with health insurance, visits to the emergency room (ER) will decrease while visits to a usual source of care (USC), such as a general practitioner, will increase. In examining year 2007 of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, this study seeks to test this hypothesis by answering two questions: 1. Whether having insurance affects ER and USC utilization, and 2. Whether greater USC utilization affects ER utilization. The analysis accounts for endogeneity issues with insurance and USC utilization. In order to account for the discrete, non negative …