Content area
Full Text
Demography (2012) 49:125149
DOI 10.1007/s13524-011-0078-4
Marianne P. Bitler & Lucie Schmidt
Published online: 14 December 2011# Population Association of America 2011
Abstract Over the last several decades, both delay of childbearing and fertility problems have become increasingly common among women in developed countries. At the same time, technological changes have made many more options available to individuals experiencing fertility problems. However, these technologies are expensive, and only 25% of health insurance plans in the United States cover infertility treatment. As a result of these high costs, legislation has been passed in 15 states that mandates insurance coverage of infertility treatment in private insurance plans. In this article, we examine whether mandated insurance coverage for infertility treatment affects utilization. We allow utilization effects to differ by age and education, since previous research suggests that older, more-educated women should be more likely to be directly affected by the mandates than younger women and less-educated women, both because they are at higher risk of fertility problems and because they are more likely to have private health insurance, which is subject to the mandate. We find robust evidence that the mandates do have a significant effect on utilization for older, more-educated women that is larger than the effects found for other groups. These effects are largest for the use of ovulation-inducing drugs and artificial insemination.
Keywords Infertility. Impaired fecundity. Health insurance mandates . Health care utilization
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0078-4
Web End =10.1007/s13524-011-0078-4 ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
M. P. Bitler
University of California-Irvine, RAND Corporation, and NBER, Irvine, CA, USA
L. Schmidt (*)
Department of Economics, Schapiro Hall, Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Utilization of Infertility Treatments: The Effects of Insurance Mandates
126 M. Bitler, L. Schmidt
Introduction
Over the last several decades, delay of childbearing among women in developed countries has become increasingly common. At the same time, the number and share of women experiencing fertility problems have also increased. In 2002, fertility problems affected 7.9 million women in the United States, and the rate of such problems among women aged 1544 had increased 44% since 1982 (Chandra and Stephen 2005). Technological changes have made many more options available to individuals experiencing fertility...