Health services utilization of elderly Swiss: Evidence from panel data

The demand for health care services by the elderly is a topic of growing im portance because of changes in the demographic structure in many countries. This paper provides estimates of the determinants of the demand for physic ian visits by the elderly, including the impact of a disability prevention intervention. We control for unobserved heterogeneity across individuals an d the count data structure of the data by estimating random effects negativ e binomial models for all primary physician and specialist visits. Copyrigh t (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.