TY  - BOOK
AU  - Jin,Ginger Zhe
AU  - Lien,Hsienming
AU  - Tao,Xuezhen
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Top-up Design and Health Care Expenditure: Evidence from Cardiac Stents 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2020///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - November 2020; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Since 2006, Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) covers the full cost of baseline treatment in cardiac stents (bare-metal stents, BMS), but requires patients to pay the incremental cost of more expensive treatments (drug-eluting stents, DES). Within this "top-up" design, we study how hospitals respond to a 26% cut of the NHI reimbursement rate in 2009. We find hospitals do not raise the DES prices from patients, but increase BMS usage per admission by 18%, recouping up to 30% of the revenue loss in 2009-2010. Overall, the rate cut is effective in reducing NHI expenditure despite hospitals' moral hazard adjustment
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w28107
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w28107
ER  -