Efeitos da regulação da ANS sobre custos assimétricos em cooperativas médicas

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study aimed at analyzing the sticky cost phenomenon in medical cooperative (Unimeds) under the National Supplementary Health Agency (NSHA) regulation. The study was a quantitative and explanatory one. The employed sample consisted of Unimeds whose 2010-2016 data (operational and financial ones) are publicly available on the ANS website. Data analysis followed two techniques: descriptive statistics and data panel regression. In according to Richartz (2016), we used three different proxies of cost in estimating models: cost of provided service (CPS), selling, general and administrative costs (SG&A) and total cost (TC). We identified a sticky behavior of Unimeds’ costs considering all cited proxies. It was observed that financial independent variables (e.g. available, fixed assets, liabilities and total assets) had significant effects on cost stickiness in model, which employed TC as a proxy of cost. The regulation variables’ coefficients – proportion of collective plans (COL), proportion of older plans (OLD) and dependency ratio (DEP) – were significant and presented the predicted signal. This significance was observed, at least, in one of the estimated models. Therefore, one can say that the NSHA regulation influences the cost sticky in Unimeds. However, when we used the dependent variables SG&A and TC, the signal of the coefficients of OLD diverged from the expected one. Thus, the purposed hypotheses were partly confirmed.