Health Policy Manag.  2024 Mar;34(1):87-93. 10.4332/KJHPA.2024.34.1.87.

Medical Costs between Dietary Supplement Users and Non-users Using the Korea Health Panel Data

• Kwon HY
• Oh S

• KMID: 2562566
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.4332/KJHPA.2024.34.1.87

Abstract

Background
In recent years, studies have shown conflicting results regarding the benefits of dietary supplements in reducing healthcare expenditures. This study aimed to address this inconsistency by examining the association between supplement consumption and health expenditures using nationally representative data from the Korea Health Panel Survey (2019–2020).
Methods
A 1:1 matched case-control dataset was established using propensity score matching technique based on supplement consumption. Then, total annual healthcare expenditures were compared between the two groups. In addition, a multivariate regression analysis (Proc Surveyreg) was performed to determine the association between the supplement consumption and medical costs.
Results
The supplement user group spent about 1.72 million Korean won, while the non-user group spent about 1.43 million Korean won on medical services (p=0.0186). The results of multivariate regression showed that the costs were approximately 26.15% higher in the user group than in the non-user group (p=0.0004).
Conclusion
Contrary to the previous studies that have shown the benefits of supplement use in reducing healthcare costs, this study showed that those who consistently consumed supplements spent more on medical services. This can be interpreted in the same context as previous studies suggesting that dietary supplement intake is a healthy behavior for managing one’s health. However, we caution against drawing firm conclusions due to data limitations. Further analysis using patient-level epidemiologic data is needed.

Keyword

Dietary supplements; Health expenditures; Korea Health Panel Data; Propensity scores