Date/Time: December 1st at 8pm ET (December 2nd at 10am KST)
Presenter: Jihye Jeon (Boston University)
Title: Patient Costs and Physicians’ Information
Abstract: In response to rising health costs, insurers have increased the share of health spending that their enrollees must shoulder out-of-pocket. We study how sensitive physicians’ treatment choices are to these changing patient out-of-pocket costs and how much of physicians’ reactions to price changes reflect their price sensitivity vs. their information about patient costs. We explore physician treatment choices in the context of Type 2 diabetes patients using the state of Oregon’s All Payer All Claims dataset. We develop a model of physicians’ drug choices that places fewer assumptions on the physician’s information. We derive moment inequalities based on pairwise differences in physicians’ utility between prescribing two alternative drugs and use these inequalities to estimate bounds on our parameters of interest including the disutility of an extra dollar of out-of-pocket cost. We find that physicians are more sensitive to patient out-of-pocket costs compared to what we find via maximum likelihood under stronger informational assumptions. We conduct two sets of counterfactuals to measure the relative importance of information and price sensitivity: (a) changing the information available to physicians about patient costs; (b) changing relative prices while keeping information sets the same. Finally, we test alternative hypotheses about which variables physicians use to form expectations of patient costs and examine the heterogeneity of information across physician types.
Zoom link to the seminar: https://sfu.zoom.us/j/66875572780?pwd=aDU5S1ovamllZzYwK1MwVkp2cWZaUT09
We look forward to seeing you then!
Best,
KAEA-VSS Empirical Micro and Microeconometrics organizers
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