Financial performance in the supplementary health sector: an analysis of the variance of the profitability of health plan operators in Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Luiz da Silva, Gladston
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Rocha, Carlos Henrique, Britto, Paulo Augusto Pettenuzzo de
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Gestão & Saúde (Brasília)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/rgs/article/view/32463
• topic: Decomposição da variância; Retorno sobre o ativo; Operadoras brasileiras de planos de saúde.; Descomposición de varianza; Retorno sobre activos; Operadores de planes de salud brasileños.; Decomposition of variance; Return on assets; Brazilian health plan operators.

The supplementary health market in Brazil is regulated by the National Supplementary Health Agency. The Agency is responsible, among others, for promoting the defense of the public interest in supplementary health care and contributing to the development of health actions in the country. To fulfill its duties, the regulator must keep the information base continuously updated. Although the Agency does not directly regulate prices in the market, it must monitor the financial performance of health plan operators - OPS. This study provides an analysis of the return of 14 OPS in Brazil, in the period 2007-2016, using the technique of decomposition of the return on asset variance. The modeling is based on the pioneering study by Schmalensee(1). Four effects were tested: scope, flag, corporate and year. The most important innovation of the study is to introduce the scope effect as a proxy for economies of scale and/or scope in the activity. It was found that the scope effect is considerably more important for the profitability of operators, followed by the flag effect; the year effect was significant, but relatively small; finally, the corporate effect was statistically insignificant.