title: Dental care demand: insurance effects and plan design.
abstract: This study concentrates on an important health policy question: the impact of dental insurance on the demand of adults for dental services. Demand equations for individuals are estimated from a systematic random sample of 4,173 families with complete information on their dental claims (insured through Pennsylvania Blue Shield) and survey data. The principal contributions of the research are twofold: (1) to provide rigorous, large-sample estimates of the demand for dental services of insured individuals--providing a complementary set of "natural" experiment results to the randomized experiment results of the RAND Health Insurance Experiment--and (2) to estimate the incremental effects on dental care demand of certain factors related to adverse selection. The study is a companion to a previously published study of children by the same authors. Generally, the analysis shows relatively small money price elasticities of dental care demand among this insured adult population (ranging from -.01 to -.266 across specific types of service). Given a finding that total expenditures for Basic services are 37 percent and 90 percent higher, respectively, for community-rated (versus experience-rated) primary subscribers and insureds, we conclude that differential adverse selection between community- and experience-rated groups accounts for significant differences in dental demand.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D003365:Costs and Cost Analysis; D003752:Dental Health Services / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005102:Health Expenditures; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand; D006302:Health Services Research; D006801:Humans; D007347:Insurance, Dental; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D010414:Pennsylvania; D011336:Probability; D012494:Sampling Studies