| dc.description.abstract | Due to social, economic and environmental changes, higher education, and better living quality recently in Taiwan, the type of diseases has changed from infectious diseases to chronic diseases. The proportion of chronic treatments is tremendous in medical expenses. In order to fight chronic diseases, preventive health care is the best policy. Therefore, we try to find out the factors which affect people’s decisions in preventive health care. According to traditional literatures, education is one of the main factors. Demand for health care increases with people’s education level, and the more people turn to health care, their attitude will more likely turn to risk averse. Furthermore, we would like to examine the possibility of over-estimation of the influence education has on the demand of preventive health care, after taking risk attitude into consideration.
According to the data from the Department of Health of R. O. C., we use a bivariate probit model and a probit model to analyze the relationship between education and risk attitude. Our results show that after restraining personal risk attitude, in women of the age group 40 and above, the influence of educational level on personal checkups, breast X rays and sonar inspection show the possibility of over-estimation. In the age group 25-30, there is no significant change in influences on health inspection, possibly due to the lack of effect risk attitude has on the demand of health inspections. | en_US |