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Abstract
Low-income individuals encounter significant personal, social, economic, and political obstacles to adequate health care. Transportation challenges, communication barriers, and a lack of trust in treatment, cooccurring with medical and financial illiteracy are all examples of these obstacles. Given these obstacles, there is a clear opportunity for behavioral economic interventions to encourage utilization of services at a free clinic. This includes interventions that uses default option, which is comprised of minor adjustments in the choice architecture that favor desirable selections while protecting individual autonomy. This research also evaluated the moderating effect that patient-provider concordance of language and gender as well as income have on the utilization of services. The research demonstrated that participants who were offered the default option showed greater utilization of the Food Pharmacy compared to participants in the free choice group. Patient-provider language and gender concordance moderates the main effect whereas income does not. The default effect is a well-established phenomenon in behavioral economics that has important implications for economic decision-making. By understanding the underlying mechanisms of the default effect and concordance policymakers and business leaders can design more effective interventions to influence consumer behavior.