The impact of Universal Health Coverage on healthcare consumption and risky behaviours: evidence from Thailand

Thailand is among one of the first non OECD countries to have successfully introduced a form of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in 2002. This policy defines a natural experiment for the evaluation of the effects of public health insurance on health behaviours. In the present paper, we look at the impact of the Thai UHC on preventive activities, risky behaviours and healthcare consumption using data from the 1996, 2001 and 2003 Health and Welfare Survey of Thailand. We use double robust estimators combining propensity scores and linear regressions to estimate Difference-in-Differences (DD) and Difference in DD (DDD) models. Results offer important insights. First, previously uninsured men and women increased their preventive activities (check-ups) more than any other groups. At the same time, there is no evidence of either an increase in risky behaviours or a reduction of preventive efforts by the newly insured population. In other words, we find no evidence of ex ante moral hazard. Regarding healthcare consumption, we see that hospital admissions increased by 2% and outpatient visits increased by 13% due to the UHC. Overall, these findings imply positive health impacts among the Thai population who entered in the UHC

Complementary Platforms

We introduce an analytical framework close to the canonical model of platform competition investigated by Rochet and Tirole (2006) to study pricing decisions in two-sided markets when two or more platforms are needed simultaneously for the successful completion of a transaction. The model developed is a natural extension of the Cournot-Ellet theory of complementary monopoly featuring clear cut asymmetric single- and multihoming patterns across the market. The results indicate that the so-called anticommons problem generalizes to two-sided markets because individual platforms do not take into account the negative pricing externality they exert on the other platforms. As a result, mergers between such platforms may be welfare enhancing, but involve redistribution of surplus from one side of the market to the other. Moreover, the limit of an atomistic allocation of property rights however is not monopoly pricing, indicating that there also exist differences with the received theory of complementarity