The study, titled “Effects of Private Health Insurance on Medical Expenditure and Health Service Utilization in South Korea: A Quantile Regression Analysis,” was authored by Kristine Namhee Kwon and Wankyo Chung and published in BMC Health Services Research.
In South Korea, private health insurance serves as supplementary coverage, supporting medical services not covered by the national health insurance. This study examined the impact of private health insurance enrollment on medical expenditure and health service utilization. The findings highlighted that private health insurance enrollment was positively correlated with outpatient costs and inpatient care utilization. Private health insurance had a more significant effect on the lower quantiles of the conditional distribution of outpatient costs and the higher quantiles of inpatient care utilization. The study suggested that government policies should consider these heterogeneous distributional effects of private health insurance.