More than one red herring? Heterogeneous effects of ageing on healthcare utilisation

Costa-Font, Joan ORCID: 0000-0001-7174-7919 and Vilaplana-Prieto, Cristina (2020) More than one red herring? Heterogeneous effects of ageing on healthcare utilisation. Health Economics, 29 (S1). 8 - 29. ISSN 1057-9230

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Abstract

We study the effect of ageing, defined as an extra year of life, on health care utilisation. We disentangle the direct effect of ageing, from other alternative explanations such as the presence of comorbidities and endogenous time to death (TTD) that are argued to absorb the effect of ageing (so‐called ‘red herring’ hypothesis). We exploit individual level end of life data from several European countries that record the use of medicine, outpatient and inpatient care and long‐term care. Consistently with the ‘red herring hypothesis’, we find that corrected TTD estimates are significantly different from uncorrected ones, and their effect size exceeds that of an extra year of life, which in turn is moderated by individual comorbidities. Corrected estimates suggest an overall attenuated effect of ageing, which does not influence outpatient care utilisation. These results suggest the presence of ‘more than one red herring’ depending on the type of health care examined.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10991050
Additional Information:	© 2020 The Authors
Divisions:	Health Policy
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
JEL classification:	I - Health, Education, and Welfare > I1 - Health > I18 - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
Date Deposited:	05 May 2020 11:54
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2024 03:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/104243

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