Does Physician Dispensing Increase Drug Expenditures?

Kaiser, Boris; Schmid, Christian (July 2013). Does Physician Dispensing Increase Drug Expenditures? (Discussion Papers 13-03). Bern: Department of Economics

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We analyze whether the possibility for physicians to dispense drugs increases health care
expenditures due to the incentives created by the markup on drugs sold. Using comprehensive physician-level data from Switzerland, we exploit the fact that there is regional variation in the dispensing regime to estimate policy effects. The empirical strategy consists of doubly-robust estimation which combines inverse-probability weighting with regression. Our main finding suggests that if dispensing is permitted, physicians produce significantly higher drug costs in the order of 30% per patient.

Item Type:

Working Paper

Division/Institute:

03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Department of Economics

UniBE Contributor:

Kaiser, Boris, Schmid, Christian Philipp

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 330 Economics

Series:

Discussion Papers

Publisher:

Department of Economics

Language:

English

Submitter:

Lars Tschannen

Date Deposited:

27 Oct 2020 16:21

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:40

JEL Classification:

I11, I18, C21

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.145762

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/145762

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