Noelle-Angelique Molinari1, Mark Messonnier
1, Jeanne Santoli
2, Abigail Shefer
3, and Fangjun Zhou
2. (1) NIP/HSREB, CDC, 1600 Clifton Road, NE, MS-E52, Atlanta, GA, USA, (2) National Immunization Program, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, NE, MS E-52, Atlanta, GA, USA, (3) HSREB/ISD/NIP, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1600 Clifton Road, MS E-52, Atlanta, USA
BACKGROUND:
It is said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In public health, disease prevention is very highly valued. Health insurance benefits play an important role in the determination of access to care and access to care is, in turn, necessary for the receipt of preventive medical services, such as vaccinations and screenings. Therefore, insurance coverage of preventive services is highly valued in public health. But how valuable is this coverage to the individual or to Society as a whole?
OBJECTIVE:
This paper uses a hedonic pricing methodology to value coverage of a variety of services, including adult and child preventive care.
METHOD:
We use data on premiums and benefit plan descriptions of 1,539 private insurance plans from the Georgia Department of Insurance for 2003. The data include extensive information on benefits, such as deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance, over a range of services from outpatient mental health to inpatient physician services. A Box-Cox transformation is used to determine the proper specification of the regression and the transformed premium is then regressed on characteristics of the plan. The resulting derivatives of the premium with respect to each type of coverage represent the impact on the premium of increasing that coverage.
RESULT:
Preliminary results indicate that certain types of preventive care coverage, such as adult and child immunization coverage and maternity care coverage, are associated with decreased premiums. This may indicate that certain types of preventive care reduce expected claims, since the premium is a function of expected claims. Further, emergency department coverage and after hours clinic coverage are also negatively related to the premium, suggesting that ease of access to urgent care may also reduce expected claims.
CONCLUSION:
The results suggest that there is economic benefit to both the public and private sectors of improving insurance coverage, and thereby access to preventive medical services. If increased coverage leads to reduced expected claims by preventing disease or reducing disease severity, then it makes sense for everyone.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Characterize values for insurance coverage of medical services.
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