May 2018 - The impact of cost sharing for mental health care on health care use and labor market outcomes

On Thursday May 31, dr. Bastian Ravesteijn (Harvard Medical School and Paris Descartes University) visited us at the Faculty of Economics and Business to talk about his latest research on the impact of cost sharing for mental health care on health care use and labor market outcomes. This seminar was organised by Centre of Expertise Healthwise, the signature area Public Health and the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health.

About dr. Bastian Ravesteijn

Dr. Bastian Ravesteijn is a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a postdoctoral research fellow at Paris Descartes University. He has obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Amsterdam, in 2016.
 
The research fields of Ravesteijn are health economics, public economics, and applied econometrics. His current and previous research focuses on the costs of mental health care and the relation between occupation and health (inequality).

Read more:
> Go to Ravesteijn's website
> Download full CV

Abstract

The Impact of Cost Sharing for Mental Health Care on Health Care Use and Labor Market Outcomes

This paper investigates whether less generous insurance coverage for mental health care impacts economic productivity through reduced mental health treatment. We evaluate a health insurance reform in the Netherlands and use exogenous variation in the out-of-pocket price of treatment continuation, which depended on the exact date on which a patient began a prior treatment record before the reform was announced. We construct a dataset that links at the individual level administrative data on the mental health care claims records of all residents of the Netherlands to administrative data on employment. Our results indicate that the reduction in moral hazard under less generous insurance came at the expense of reductions in employment for certain subpopulations. Therefore, a well-targeted Pigouvian subsidy in the form of a lower out-of-pocket price for mental health care can be welfare-improving.