IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/20927.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Patient Responses to Incentives in Consumer-directed Health Plans: Evidence from Pharmaceuticals

Author

Listed:
  • Peter J. Huckfeldt
  • Amelia Haviland
  • Ateev Mehrotra
  • Zachary Wagner
  • Neeraj Sood

Abstract

Prior studies suggest that consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) -characterized by high deductibles and health care accounts- reduce health costs, but there is concern that enrollees indiscriminately reduce use of low-value services (e.g., unnecessary emergency department use) and high-value services (e.g., preventive care). We investigate how CDHP enrollees change use of pharmaceuticals for chronic diseases. We compare two large firms where nearly all employees were switched to CDHPs to firms with conventional health insurance plans. In the first firm’s CDHP, pharmaceuticals were subject to the deductible, while in the second firm pharmaceuticals were exempt. Employees in the first firm shifted the timing of drug purchases to periods with lower cost sharing and were more likely to use lower-cost drugs, but the largest effect of the CDHP was to reduce utilization. Employees in the second firm also reduced utilization, but did not shift the timing or use of low cost drugs.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter J. Huckfeldt & Amelia Haviland & Ateev Mehrotra & Zachary Wagner & Neeraj Sood, 2015. "Patient Responses to Incentives in Consumer-directed Health Plans: Evidence from Pharmaceuticals," NBER Working Papers 20927, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20927
    Note: EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20927.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Haviland, Amelia M. & Eisenberg, Matthew D. & Mehrotra, Ateev & Huckfeldt, Peter J. & Sood, Neeraj, 2016. "Do “Consumer-Directed” health plans bend the cost curve over time?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 33-51.
    2. Ackley, Calvin A., 2022. "Tiered cost sharing and health care demand," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    3. Whaley, Christopher M., 2019. "Provider responses to online price transparency," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 241-259.
    4. Eisenberg, Matthew D. & Haviland, Amelia M. & Mehrotra, Ateev & Huckfeldt, Peter J. & Sood, Neeraj, 2017. "The long term effects of “Consumer-Directed” health plans on preventive care use," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 61-75.
    5. Jonathan Gruber & Johanna Catherine Maclean & Bill J. Wright & Eric S. Wilkinson & Kevin Volpp, 2016. "The Impact of Increased Cost-sharing on Utilization of Low Value Services: Evidence from the State of Oregon," NBER Working Papers 22875, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Jonathan Gruber & Johanna Catherine Maclean & Bill Wright & Eric Wilkinson & Kevin G. Volpp, 2020. "The effect of increased cost‐sharing on low‐value service use," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(10), pages 1180-1201, October.
    7. Salvi, Irene & Cordier, Johannes & Kuklinski, David & Vogel, Justus & Geissler, Alexander, 2023. "Price sensitivity and demand for healthcare services: Investigating demand-side financial incentives using anonymised claims data from Switzerland," Working Paper Series in Health Economics, Management and Policy 2023-06, University of St.Gallen, School of Medicine, Chair of Health Economics, Policy and Management.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • I13 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Insurance, Public and Private

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20927. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.