One aspect that stood out from Table 3 is the finding that individuals born in Türkiye show both significantly higher primary care utilization and a higher likelihood of hospitalization compared to those born in Russia. This seems to contradict the common assumption that increased primary care use helps reduce hospital admissions. How do the authors explain this pattern? Could it reflect unmeasured differences in quality or continuity of care, or potentially spatial disparities in service access, such as regional variations in provider availability, that weren’t accounted for in the model due to the lack of geographic data in SOEP? Would proxy variables like urban/rural classification or federal state have helped address this?
