Effect of having private health insurance on the use of health care services: the case of Spain

Background

Several stakeholders have undertaken initiatives to propose solutions towards a more sustainable health system and Spain, as an example of a European country affected by austerity measures, is looking for ways to cut healthcare budgets.

Methods

The aim of this paper is to study the effect of private health insurance on health care utilization using the latest micro-data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the Spanish National Health Survey (SNHS) and the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). We use matching techniques based on propensity score methods: single match, four matches, bias-adjustment and allowing for heteroskedasticity.

Results

The results demonstrate that people with a private health insurance, use the public health system less than individuals without double health insurance coverage.

Conclusions

Our conclusions are useful when policy makers design public-private partnership policies.

Health and retirement in Europe

We use discrete-time hazard models with internationally comparable data from the full eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to study the relationship between retirement and health in nine European countries. Our results provide new evidence of the relationship of health shocks to early retirement. The pattern of results across countries reflects international differences in the incentives created by social security systems.