Japanese economists have used the creation of Japan’s current long-term care insurance (LTCI) to test a common idea: That for-profit health care providers enter markets when costs appear to be low and the size of the market appears to be large.
Mutsumi Tokunaga and Hideki Hashimoto published a paper about provider market entry in the academic journal Social Science & Medicine.
Japan set up the country’s public LTCI system in 2000. The system lets for-profit providers provide home care services,
Tokunaga and Hashimoto used nationwide survey data collected from 2002 to 2010 and broke the provider numbers down using various other types of data.