Long-term effects of oral clefts on health care utilization: a sibling comparison.

Oral clefts are among the most common birth defects affecting thousands of newborns each year, but little is known about their potential long-term consequences. In this paper, we explore the impact of oral clefts on health care utilization over most of the lifespan. To account for time-invariant unobservable parental characteristics, we compare affected individuals with their own unaffected siblings. The analysis is based on unique data comprising the entire cohort of individuals born with oral clefts in Denmark tracked until adulthood in administrative register data. We find that children with oral clefts use more health services than their unaffected siblings. Additional results show that the effects are driven primarily by congenital malformation-related hospitalizations and intake of anti-infectives. Although the absolute differences in most health care utilization diminish over time, affected individuals have slightly higher utilization of some health care services in adulthood (particularly for diseases of the nervous and respiratory system). These results have important implications for affected individuals, their families, and their health professionals.

Bargaining for health: a case study of a collective agreement-based health program for manual workers.

This paper examines the short- and medium-term effects of the PensionDanmark Health Scheme, the largest privately administered health program for workers in Denmark, which provides prevention and early management of work-related injuries. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits a natural variation in the program rollout across collective agreement areas in the construction sector and over time. The results show only little evidence of an effect on the prevention of injuries requiring medical attention in the first 3 years after the program was introduced. Despite this, we find evidence of significant positive effects on several labor market outcomes, suggesting that the program enables some work-injured individuals to maintain their work and earnings capacity. In view of its low costs, the program appears to be cost-effective overall.

To what extent does employer-paid health insurance reduce the use of public hospitals?

OBJECTIVE: This study examines the extent to which employer-paid health insurance has led to substitution of public with private hospital use in Denmark. METHODS: Individual-person-level data for the entire Danish privately employed, full-time working population is used in an observational design. The effect of having employer-paid health insurance on the utilisation of public hospitals is estimated using propensity score matching in order to control for risk selection, based on a number of individual- and company-level characteristics. The outcome is defined as the total consumption of health care services provided by public hospitals. RESULTS: The effect of employer-paid health insurance is estimated to correspond to a significant 10% reduction in the total use of public hospitals. The effect appears to be robust to alternative methodological specifications and is supported from the analysis of alternative outcome measures. CONCLUSION: The rise in the number of individuals with employer-paid health insurance seems to have alleviated the pressure on public hospitals in Denmark. Future studies should confirm the magnitude of this effect, preferably based on empirical data with repeated measurements of insurance status.