Health Insurance Status and Physician Behavior in Germany

Germany has a two-tier system of statutory and primary private health insurance. Both insurance types provide fee-for-service insurance, but chargeable fees for identical services are more than twice as large for privately insured as for statutorily insured patients. Using German SOEP 2002 data, I analyze the effect of insurance status on the insured's number of doctor visits. Conditional on health, privately insured patients are less likely to contact a physician than publicly insured but more frequently visit a doctor following a first contact. This is indirect evidence for the hypothesis that physicians over-treat privately insured patients at least relative to the statutorily insured.