Journal
JOURNAL OF HEALTH ECONOMICS
Volume 58, Issue -, Pages 43-66Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2018.01.002
Keywords
Hospital admissions; Hospital utilization; Long-term care reform; Bed-blocking; Poisson hurdle model; Spain
Funding
- Spanish Ministry of Economy [ECO2014-52238-R, ECO2014-53419-R]
- LSE
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We use quasi-experimental evidence on the expansion of the public subsidization of long-term care to examine the causal effect of a change in caregiving affordability on the delivery of hospital care. More specifically, we examine a reform that both introduced a new caregiving allowance and expanded the availability of publicly funded home care services, on both hospital admissions (both on the internal and external margin) and length of stay. We find robust evidence of a reduction in both hospital admissions and utilization among both those receiving a caregiving allowance and, albeit less intensely, among beneficiaries of publicly funded home care, which amounts to 11% of total healthcare costs. These effects were stronger when regions had an operative regional health and social care coordination plan in place. Consistently, a subsequent reduction in the subsidy, five years after its implementation, is found to significantly attenuate such effects. We investigate a number of potential mechanisms, and show a number of falsification and robustness checks. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available