Financial incentives and physician prescription behavior: Evidence from dispensing regulations.
- Burkhard D Department of Economics, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
- Schmid CPR Department of Economics, University of Bern, Bern, and CSS Institute for Empirical Health Economics, Lucerne, Switzerland.
- Wüthrich K Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, USA.
- 2019-07-03
Published in:
- Health economics. - 2019
drug expenditures
physician agency
physician dispensing
substitution response
volume response
Ambulatory Care
Drug Prescriptions
Humans
Insurance, Health
Insurance, Pharmaceutical Services
Models, Economic
Physician Incentive Plans
Practice Patterns, Physicians'
Switzerland
English
In many health care markets, physicians can respond to changes in reimbursement schemes by changing the volume (volume response) and the composition of services provided (substitution response). We examine the relative importance of these two behavioral responses in the context of physician drug dispensing in Switzerland. We find that dispensing increases drug costs by 52% for general practitioners and 56% for specialists. This increase is mainly due to a volume increase. The substitution response is negative on average, but not significantly different from zero for large parts of the distribution. In addition, our results reveal substantial effect heterogeneity.
- Language
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- English
- Open access status
- green
- Identifiers
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- DOI 10.1002/hec.3893
- PMID 31264330
- Persistent URL
- https://sonar.ch/global/documents/44514
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