Publication: ‘More than one red herring’? Heterogeneous effects of ageing on health care utilisation
Authors
Costa-Font, Joan ; Vilaplana Prieto, Cristina
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Publisher
Wiley
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.4035
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info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Description
© 2020 The Authors. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This document is the Published version of a Published Work that appeared in final form in Health Economics. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/
10.1002/hec.4035
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.
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Citation
Health Economics. 2020 1–22
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