IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp1784.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

'Taxing' Doctors: The Impact of Income Caps on the Provision of Medical Services

Author

Listed:
  • Kralj, Boris

    (Ontario Medical Assocation)

  • Kantarevic, Jasmin

    (Ontario Medical Assocation)

  • Weinkauf, Darrel

    (Ontario Medical Assocation)

Abstract

Income cap or threshold systems rely on incentives that encourage physicians to limit medical expenditures, but little is known about how physicians respond to these incentives. Conceptually, the threshold system is to physicians what an income tax system is to taxpayers. We exploit this similarity to analyze the impact of a reform that changed what is included in the 'taxable' billings of physicians in Ontario, Canada. We find that for services that the reform turned from exempted to non-exempted, the reform had a strong, negative impact for physicians with billings above the minimum threshold and a negligible impact for physicians below the threshold. The reform had no impact on services that were non-exempted both before and after the reform. This response of physicians to the threshold reform resembles the expected response of taxpayers to a similar change in the income tax system.

Suggested Citation

  • Kralj, Boris & Kantarevic, Jasmin & Weinkauf, Darrel, 2005. "'Taxing' Doctors: The Impact of Income Caps on the Provision of Medical Services," IZA Discussion Papers 1784, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp1784
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp1784.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    non-convex budget sets; income thresholds; physicians' behavior;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

    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:iza:izadps:dp1784. 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: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.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.