Health care utilisation in Europe: new evidence from the ECHP

The ECHP is used to analyse the utilisation of health care in Europe. We estimate a new latent class hurdle model for panel data and compare it with the latent class NegBin model and the standard hurdle model. Latent class specifications outperform the standard hurdle model but the latent class hurdle model reveals income e¤ects on the probability of visiting a doctor that are masked in the NegBin model. For visits to specialist, low users are more income elastic than high users and the probability of using health care is more income elastic than the conditional number of visits.