Does Physician Dispensing Increase Drug Expenditures? Empirical Evidence from Switzerland
利用瑞士地区间医生配药制度的差异，采用双重稳健估计方法，发现允许医生配药会使每位患者的药品成本增加约34%。
This paper analyzes whether the opportunity for physicians to dispense drugs increases healthcare expenditures. We study the case of Switzerland, where dispensing physicians face financial incentives to overprescribe and sell more expensive pharmaceuticals. Using comprehensive physician-level data, we exploit the regional variation in the dispensing regime to estimate causal effects. The empirical strategy consists of a doubly-robust estimation that combines inverse probability weighting with regression. Our main finding suggests that dispensing leads to higher drug costs on the order of 34% per patient.