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Exploring variations in health‐care expenditures—What is the role of practice styles?
Author(s) -
Ahammer Alexander,
Schober Thomas
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
health economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.55
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1099-1050
pISSN - 1057-9230
DOI - 10.1002/hec.4011
Subject(s) - global positioning system , sample (material) , variation (astronomy) , exploit , health care , set (abstract data type) , health spending , medicine , actuarial science , business , family medicine , computer science , health insurance , economics , economic growth , programming language , telecommunications , chemistry , physics , computer security , chromatography , astrophysics
Variations in medical resource usage, both across and within geographical regions, have been widely documented. In this paper, we explore physician practice styles as a possible determinant of these variations. In particular, we exploit patient mobility between physicians to identify practice styles among general practitioners (GPs) in Austria. We use a large administrative data set containing detailed information on a battery of different health‐care services and implement a model with additive patient and GP fixed effects that allows flexibly for systematic differences in patients' health states. We find that, although GPs explain only a small part of the overall variation in medical expenses, heterogeneities in spending patterns among GPs are substantial. Conditional on patient characteristics, we document a difference of € 751.47 per patient per year in total medical expenses (which amounts to roughly 45% of the sample mean) between high‐ and low‐spending GPs.