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Health Insurance Competition in Germany – the Role of Advertising
Becker, Bettina | Uebelmesser, Silke
Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, Vol. 130 (2010), Iss. 2 : pp. 169–194
2 Citations (CrossRef)
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Bettina Becker, Department of Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UK.
Silke Uebelmesser, CES, University of Munich, Schackstrasse 4, 80539 Munich, Germany.
Cited By
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The Cult of Statistical Signi ficance - What Economists Should and Should Not Do To Make Their Data Talk
Krämer, Walter
SSRN Electronic Journal, Vol. (2011), Iss.
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1915956 [Citations: 1] -
The Cult of Statistical Significance – What Economists Should and Should Not Do to Make their Data Talk
Krämer, Walter
Schmollers Jahrbuch, Vol. 131 (2011), Iss. 3 P.455
https://doi.org/10.3790/schm.131.3.455 [Citations: 22]
Abstract
In the 1990s, competition among public health insurance funds (’sickness funds") was introduced in Germany. As one means of competition, free choice of initial health funds and subsequent switching between them was made available to all insured. Since then, the number of funds has decreased substantially, and funds have had to engage in competitive strategies to remain in the market. In this paper, we want to analyse the funds' advertising activities in the face of the changed competitive environment. This has not been possible to date due to a lack of data. We use two new datasets to get a first insight into the potential effects of competition on funds' advertising strategies; one of the volume and cost of advertisements and one of their contents.
Our results suggest that competition has been associated with an increase in the amount of advertising. As to the adverts themselves, we find that there was a decrease in the share of advertisements of a ’general" content in favour of advertisements of a more ’fund-specific" content. The data therefore indicate that once the market was open to switching of funds by the insured, funds' advertising efforts changed to differentiating their own perceived strengths from those of competitor funds. These observations allow us to draw some tentative conclusions about the relevance of (attempts of) risk selection by health funds via advertisements and about the general success of the pro-competitive legislation.
Received: September 16, 2008
Accepted: March 16, 2010