Overweight and obesity and the utilization of primary care physicians

Abstract

We investigate whether overweight or obese individuals utilize more medical care than normal weight individuals by estimating a finite mixture model which splits the population into frequent and non-frequent users of primary care physician (GP) services. Based on a survey sample aged 25-60 years from the National Health Interview (NHI) 2000 merged to Danish register data, we compare differences in the impact of being overweight and obese relative to being normal weight on the utilization of GP services. Estimated bodyweight effects vary across latent classes and show that being obese or overweight does not increase the utilization of GP services among infrequent users but does so among frequent users. Obese (and to a lesser extent, overweight) infrequent users are observed 5 years later to substantially increase their health-care usage as measured by doctor visits, hospitalizations, and number of bed days.