Discerning the Effects of Recent Private Health Insurance Policy Changes in Australia

This file is part of IDEAS, which uses RePEc data

Discerning the Effects of Recent Private Health Insurance Policy Changes in Australia

Author Info

Jongsay Yong
Alfons Palangkaraya

Additional information is available for the following registered author(s):

Abstract

The Australian government implemented several new policy initiatives during 1997--2000, with the stated aim of raising the take-up rate of private health insurance. Taken together, these policy initiatives were quite effective, the proportion of the population with private health insurance cover increased by more than 35\%. However, much less clear is the effectiveness of different components of the policies, due to their sequential implementation. Since there are large cost differences in implementing these policies, an understanding of the effects of each policy is important for policymaking. This paper attempts to isolate the effects of different policies using the 1995 and 2001 National Health Survey data. The two datasets allow the estimation of private health insurance demands before and after the policy changes. The results were used to perform a counterfactual analysis of what would have happened had there been no new policies. Further, utilizing the age-specific aspect of Lifetime Health Cover, we are able to isolate its contribution to within 42\% and 75\% of the increase in private health insurance membership.

Download Info
To download:

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. Information about this may be contained in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

Publisher Info
Paper provided by Econometric Society in its series Econometric Society 2004 Australasian Meetings with number 183.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML, plain text, BibTeX, RIS (EndNote), ReDIF
Length:
Date of creation: 11 Aug 2004
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ecm:ausm04:183

Contact details of provider:
Phone: 1 212 998 3820
Fax: 1 212 995 4487
Email:
Web page: http://www.econometricsociety.org/pastmeetings.asp
More information through EDIRC

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).

Find related papers by JEL classification:
I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2004-10-30 (All new papers)
NEP-HEA-2004-10-30 (Health Economics)
NEP-IAS-2004-10-30 (Insurance Economics)

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

Hopkins, Sandra & Kidd, Michael P, 1996. "The Determinants of the Demand for Private Health Insurance under Medicare," Applied Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 28(12), pages 1623-32, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
Ted Frech & Sandra Hopkins & Gary MacDonald, 2002. "The Australian Private Health Insurance Boom: Was It Subsidies Or Liberalised?," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series 4-02, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara. [Downloadable!]
Cameron, A. Colin & Trivedi, Pravin K., 1991. "The role of income and health risk in the choice of health insurance : Evidence from Australia," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 1-28, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)

Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

Alfons Palangkaraya & Jongsay Yong, 2004. "How Effective is Lifetime Health Cover in Raising Private Health Insurance Coverage in Australia? An Assessment Using Regression Discontinuity," Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series wp2004n33, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne. [Downloadable!]
Other versions:
- Alfons Palangkaraya & Jongsay Yong, 2007. "How effective is "lifetime health cover" in raising private health insurance coverage in Australia? An assessment using regression discontinuity," Applied Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 39(11), pages 1361-1374. [Downloadable!] (restricted)

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Did you know? Apart from a small start up grant in the 1990's, RePEc has received no funding and lives on the help of volunteers.

This page was last updated on 2008-10-3.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Department of Economics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Connecticut using RePEc data on a server sponsored by the Society for Economic Dynamics.