The rationale for demand side cost sharing in health insurance is to deter patients from using low value care. But if agents are cash constrained, demand side cost sharing can lead them to postpone or forgo valuable treatments. We use data on European (NUTS 2) regions to show that the interaction between poverty rate and out-of-pocket payments leads to unmet medical needs and higher mortality. See GitHub repository.

Data were collected from the Eurostat website using python https://janboone.github.io/out_of_pocket_payments_and_health/getting_data.html.