Did adolescents in Norway respond to the elimination of copayments for general practitioner services?

Abstract

Copayments for primary care services may lead to decreased access to and underconsumption of necessary health care for vulnerable patient groups, such as adolescents. In Norway, in 2010, adolescents aged 12 to 15years were exempted from copayments for general practitioner (GP) services, and the aim of this study is to estimate whether being exempted from copayments led to increases in GP visits. We apply the synthetic control method using the elastic net regression as a data-driven approach to construct a relevant counterfactual from our pool of age groups not affected by the reform. Data on the number of GP consultations for males and females from 2006 to 2013 is obtained from the Norwegian Health Economics Administration. Our findings suggest that exempting adolescents from copayments increased the number of per person GP consultations by 22.1% among females and 13.8% among males. This indicates that adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15 were sensitive to copayments before the reform and females more so than males.