{"product_id":"9781604339147","title":"The Speedy Christmas Tree : Holiday Spirit in Seconds! No Needles, No Watering, No Mess!","description":"This dissertation examines the determinants of preventive dental care use and dental health outcomes, and it contributes to our understanding of forces behind the phenomenon of socioeconomic disparities in health. We explore the role of socioeconomic factors, dental health insurance and dental health preferences on the decision to use preventive dental care services. In addition, the impact of preventive care on dental outcomes is identified and quantified. Access to quality care is a key suspect in explaining differences in outcomes, but measuring this access has not been easy. Insurance status is an obvious indicator of access to care. The dental health market is ideal for studying the role of access in producing efficient outcomes for a number of reasons: the ability to accurately measure access to care and the significant evidence base surrounding the benefits of preventive care, the wider disparities in quantity and quality of dental insurance coverage, as well as relatively high coinsurance rates in general. Using data from the dental health market we study utilization patterns by socioeconomic status and access to care. We examine the role of socioeconomic factors, dental health insurance and dental health preferences on the decision to use preventive dental care services. Estimated effects of dental health insurance are potentially biased by an adverse selection problem where the demand for services and insurance are simultaneous and driven by health need and preferences. We construct an indicator of preferences to directly purge the bias. We take into account heterogeneity in dental health preferences that may drive the propensity to insure, as well as the propensity to use dental health services (adverse selection). Using self-assessments from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), we construct indicators of preferences by taking advantage of the subjectivity incorporated in them. Using this survey we are able to test the factors of interest on the propensity to use preventive dental care, conditional on heterogeneous preferences. We find that dental insurance has a persistent effect in driving the behavior of investing in preventive dental care, even after controlling for dental care preferences. Frequency of preventive care visits are also influenced by socioeconomic status and dental insurance coverage, even after conditioning on dental preference and perceptions. Conditional on having positive visits, people of high socioeconomic status, with dental insurance, and with stronger dental health preferences, all significantly increase their frequency of care. While preferences and other factors explain some of the variation in utilization disparities, economic barriers, with lack of insurance in particular, do exist. We also examine the determinants of dental health measured by dental caries by accounting for the endogeneity of routine dental care use. Routine dental visits decrease the probability of having caries. Therefore, preventive dental care indeed translates into better health outcomes measured by dental caries. We also identify and quantify the magnitude of the separate effects of racial differences in observed characteristics such as income, education, occupation, and health behaviors, taking into account of dental care use. We find that routine dental care utilization and income explain a large portion of racial disparities among whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics.","brand":"Simon \u0026 Schuster","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055456927984,"sku":"9781604339147","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781604339147_p0.jpg?v=1763831548","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781604339147","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}