Investigators from Boston University Release New Data on Veterans Health (Veterans Health Administration Benefit Value Has Little Effect On Reliance): Veterans Health

Defense & Aerospace Daily

2025 MAR 21 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Defense & Aerospace Daily -- Current study results on Veterans Health have been published. According to news reporting originating from Boston, Massachusetts, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “US military veterans have multiple options for health insurance coverage, including the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and Medicare programs, which can lead to strategic selection of coverage and potentially inefficient budgetary allocations. Because coverage choices are likely to be a function of coverage availability and benefit value, understanding the relationship between benefit value and reliance on coverage is critical.”

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Boston University, “Analysis of cross-sectional, nationally representative survey data. This analysis relied on a novel measure of benefit value for the VHA and Medicare Advantage (MA) programs and nationally representative survey data of veterans and their health care use for 2016 through 2019. Linear regressions controlling for beneficiary and market characteristics with state and year fixed effects were used to first estimate the effect of VHA benefit value relative to MA benefit value on MA enrollment, and then on veteran reliance on VHA-paid care conditional on MA enrollment. We found that a $1 increase in relative VHA benefit value leads to at most a 0.2% (SE = 0.04) reduction in the probability of MA enrollment and a 0.3-percentage point (SE = 0.1) increase in reliance on VHA-paid care. Results were consistent across subgroups of enrollees, with slightly larger effects for enrollees with less generous benefits. For most veterans, benefit value has a small, often nonsignificant, effect on reliance.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “These results imply that changes in VHA benefit value are unlikely to have major effects on veteran reliance on the VHA.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Veterans Health Administration Benefit Value Has Little Effect On Reliance. American Journal of Managed Care, 2025;31(2). American Journal of Managed Care can be contacted at: Managed Care & Healthcare Communications Llc, 666 Plainsboro Rd, Ste 300, Plainsboro, NJ 08536, USA.

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Yevgeniy Feyman, Boston University, Dept. of Health Law Policy and Management, School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States. Additional authors for this research include Allison Dorneo, Steven D. Pizer and Christine Yee.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.37765/ajmc.2025.89684. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.