Document Type
Article
Date
6-1-2004
Keywords
tbd
Disciplines
Economics
Description/Abstract
Using data from the 1998 Wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effect of social interactions on the health insurance choices of the elderly. We find that having more social interactions, as measured by contacts with friends and neighbors, reduces the likelihood of enrolling in a Medicare managed care plan relative to purchasing a medigap policy or having coverage through Medicare alone. Our estimates indicate that social networks are an important determinant of the health insurance choices of the elderly and provide suggestive evidence that "word-of-mouth" information sharing may have played a role in the preference of some seniors for traditional indemnity insurance over managed care.
Recommended Citation
Beiseitov, Eldar; Kubik, Jeffrey D.; and Moran, John R., "Social Interactions and the Health Insurance Choices of the Elderly: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study" (2004). Economics - All Scholarship. 94.
https://surface.syr.edu/ecn/94
Source
Harvested from ssrn.com
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Additional Information
This manuscript is from the Social Science Research Network, for more information see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1809901#291928