The causal effects of mandatory health insurance coverage expansion in Switzerland

Boris Kaiser et al.

International Journal of Health Economics and Management2025https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-025-09396-5article
AJG 2
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

The expansion of public health insurance programs affects payers as well as the behavior of service providers. In this paper, we study the expansion of Swiss mandatory health insurance in 2012 to include complementary and alternative medicine physician services. The policy change provides a quasi-experimental design that allows us to estimate the causal effects on the payer and physician behavior using a difference-in-differences framework. First, we find that from the payer's perspective, expanding coverage to complementary and alternative medicine increases physician costs per patient by about 7 percent. Second, we find that the increase in physician service costs per patient in mandatory health insurance is almost exactly offset by a decrease in supplementary health insurance costs. Thus, suggesting that the behavior of physicians was unchanged by the coverage expansion.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-025-09396-5

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@article{boris2025,
  title        = {{The causal effects of mandatory health insurance coverage expansion in Switzerland}},
  author       = {Boris Kaiser et al.},
  journal      = {International Journal of Health Economics and Management},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-025-09396-5},
}

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.