Effet de l'assurance complémentaire santé sur les consommations médicales, entre risque moral et amélioration de l'accès aux soins

According to economic theory, health insurance raises medical care consumptions by inducing ex-post moral hazard behavior, it is to say the purchase of health care that individual value below their production cost. Nevertheless, among the economists community, some suggest that these additional consumptions may be the consequence of an increase of financial resources in case of illness due to reimbursements, reflecting a better access to health care. Understanding which of these effects dominates is a crucial issue to assess equity and efficiency of health care system. Based on three articles, this thesis aims to estimate how great the effect of complementary health insurance on health care consumptions is in France, and to understand the nature of this effect. The first article analyzes the effect of being covered by a complementary health insurance on the use of physician care, the second article assess how the CMU-C scheme affected health care consumptions of its beneficiaries, and the third article examines the effect of a supplementary health insurance contract that provides reimbursements in addition of the benefits of a basic complementary health insurance contract that covers civil servants. By focusing on complementary and supplementary health insurance, these articles offer the opportunity to study the effect of health insurance at the margin, on different populations.