Workshop on Human Potential (Pedro Bernal, Harris School)

Pedro Bernal, Doctoral Student, Harris School of Public Policy, will present, "Health Insurance and Hospitalization: Experimental Evidence from Mexico's Seguro Popular."

Abstract: This paper evaluates the extent to which expanding health insurance to low-income households influences utilization of inpatient care by using data from a far-reaching health reform in Mexico that provided subsidized health insurance to nearly half of its population. Recent results based on a Mexican health insurance experiment suggest that reductions in the price of health care fail to increase health care utilization. This runs contrary both to the Law of Demand and to evidence from two other large-scale health insurance experiments. We shed light into this puzzle by matching administrative data on hospitalizations to the villages included in the original experimental design and assessing the extent of crowding out. Our results suggest that there is a substantial increase in hospitalizations for the formerly uninsured, and that data quality issues obscured this finding in previous research. Evidence for crowding out is mixed.

Bio: Pedro Bernal is a Ph.D. student at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Tecnológico de Monterrey and a B.Sc. in Economics from the same university. He has worked as a consultant conducting impact evaluation for social development programs in Mexico. His research interests include health and family economics, as well as applied econometrics.  Currently, he is conducting research on the effect of access to health insurance on health care utilization, the role of school quality on student achievement, and the relationship between family structure and child outcomes.

The Workshop/Working Group on Human Potential alternates between two types of sessions. Not only do we regularly invite outside speakers for a traditional "workshop" presentation, but we also provide a forum for faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students to present research-in-progress in order to receive critical and constructive feedback.