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...2. The plots suggest that any decrease in inpatient visits is drivensby scheduled visits, rather than by inpatient visits that originated in the ED. This finding issconsistent with our previous work (=-=Anderson et al. 2012-=-), in which the largest effectssoccurred for inpatient visits that did not originate in the ED. Despite the discretionarysnature of these visits, there is no evidence that individuals stockpile care r...

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...er, 2005, 2010; Park et al., 2006). Not surprisingly, young adults who lack insurance coverage have fewer contacts with healthcare providers than do young adults with insurance (Fortuna et al., 2009; =-=Anderson et al., 2010-=-). Given the unique challenges associated with this life stage, it is surprising that young adults’ need for, access to, and use of healthcare services has been understudied relative to that of adoles...

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...or patients younger than 18, the days away from the 18th birthday are recorded as negative numbers and for patients older than 18 as positive numbers. 3 REGRESSION DISCONTINUITY DESIGN In the basic setting for the regression discontinuity design researchers are interested in the causal effect of a binary intervention or treatment. Individuals are either exposed or not exposed to a treatment. Let WiÎ{0, 1} denote a treatment with Wi = 1 if unit i was exposed to the treatment and Wi = 0 otherwise. Let Yi(Wi) denote the outcome where Yi (0) is the outcome without the exposure to treatment and Yi (1) is the outcome with exposure to treatment. We are interested in the difference Yi (1) - Yi (0). Since one can never observe Yi (0) and Yi (1) at the same time, one needs to use the average effects of the treatment over the population or a sample to estimate the average treatment effect. It is important to distinguish two RD settings: sharp and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs. Based on Imbens and Lemieux (2008), in the sharp regression discontinuity (SRD) design, the assignment Wi is a deterministic function of one 2 The hospital in question is one of the general medicine regional hospi...

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...urance makes possible collective pooling of risks and the redistribution of financial resources in such a way that assures financial protection against the cost of illness [5–7]. Access to health insurance thus comes up a game changer to significantly improve utilization of healthcare by providing financial protection against disastrous out-ofpocket healthcare expenditures. The literature establishes direct linkages between health insurance coverage and cost and actual usage of healthcare [6–9]. However, health insurance as a health financing option is poorly implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa [6, 10], and Ghana’s recent “moderately successful” experience is held up as a model not only for the region, but also on the global arena. Factors such as low enrolment [6, 11, 12] and high rates of dropout [13] help to explain the slow-paced expansion of insurance schemes in Sub-Saharan Africa including Ghana. It is also observed Hindawi Journal of Tropical Medicine Volume 2017, Article ID 8486451, 7 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/8486451 2 Journal of Tropical Medicine that health insurance enrolment inmost developing countries tends to be unbalanced as schemes favour the rich few as against th...

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...n, 2012). In this paper, we disentangle price effects from selection effects (those going into retirement might be less healthy), by exploiting a jump in the probability of retirement that occurs at the legal retirement age (65 years). This allows us to apply a regression discontinuity (RD) design, which is highly regarded for its internal validity (Lee and Lemieux, 2010). Indeed, discontinuities in insurance coverage at specific ages have yielded robust estimates of the effect of health insurance on health care use and health outcomes (Card et al,. 2008; Card et al., 2009; Shigeoka, 2011 and Anderson et al., 2012). Closer to our main object of interest, Chandra et al. (2010) examined policy changes for Californian civil servants under Medicare program that increased the level of co-payment both for physician visits and prescription drugs. They provide one of the first robust estimations of price elasticity of pharmaceuticals for the elderly, as this group was excluded from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. 4 In this paper, we combine two different data sources to obtain the price-elasticity estimates. Administrative data on individuals aged 63-67 covered by the Catalonian Health Service during 2004...