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Title
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Supplemental health insurance and equality of access in Belgium
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Author
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Abstract
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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. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Health economics. - Chichester
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Publication
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Chichester
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2010
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ISSN
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1057-9230
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Volume/pages
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19
:4
(2010)
, p. 377-395
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ISI
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000276136200001
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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