The Impact of Health Insurance for Children: Evidence from Vietnam
Abstract
Although there are numerous studies on impact evaluation of overall health insurance, little is known on the impact of health insurance on health care utilization and out-of-pocket health care spending of children, especially in developing countries. This paper measures the impact of child health insurance on health care utilization and spending of children from 6 to 14 years old in Vietnam using two recent nationally representative surveys. Unlike previous empirical studies which found a positive effect of health insurance on health care utilization in Vietnam, we did not find a statistically significant effect of school health insurance as well as free health insurance for children on outpatient health care contacts. However, the school health insurance and free health insurance help the insured children decrease out-of-pocket spending per outpatient contact by around 14 and 26 percent, respectively.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 36552.Length:
Date of creation: 21 Jun 2011
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36552
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Schackstr. 4, D-80539 Munich, Germany
Phone: +49-(0)89-2180-2219
Fax: +49-(0)89-2180-3900
Web page: http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords: Child health insurance; impact evaluation; health care utilization; out-of-pocket spending; Vietnam;Other versions of this item:
- Nguyen Viet Cuong, 2012. "The Impact of Health Insurance for Children:Evidence from Vietnam," Working Papers 33, Development and Policies Research Center (DEPOCEN), Vietnam.
- G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies
- H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health
- H43 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Project Evaluation; Social Discount Rate
- I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-02-20 (All new papers)
- NEP-DEV-2012-02-20 (Development)
- NEP-HEA-2012-02-20 (Health Economics)
- NEP-IAS-2012-02-20 (Insurance Economics)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Winnie Yip & Peter Berman, 2001. "Targeted health insurance in a low income country and its impact on access and equity in access: Egypt's school health insurance," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 10(3), pages 207-220.
- Wagstaff, Adam & Lindelow, Magnus & Jun, Gao & Ling, Xu & Juncheng, Qian, 2009.
"Extending health insurance to the rural population: An impact evaluation of China's new cooperative medical scheme,"
Journal of Health Economics,
Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 1-19, January.
- Wagstaff, Adam & Lindelow, Magnus & Gao Jun & Xu Ling & Qian Juncheng, 2007. "Extending health insurance to the rural population : an impact evaluation of China's new cooperative medical scheme," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4150, The World Bank.
- Wagstaff, Adam & Pradhan, Menno, 2005. "Health insurance impacts on health and nonmedical consumption in a developing country," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3563, The World Bank.
- Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, 2001.
"Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data,"
MIT Press Books,
The MIT Press,
edition 1, volume 1, number 0262232197.
- Jeffrey M Wooldridge, 2010. "Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 2, volume 1, number 0262232588.
- Ardeshir Sepehri & Sisira Sarma & Wayne Simpson, 2006. "Does non-profit health insurance reduce financial burden? Evidence from the Vietnam living standards survey panel," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 15(6), pages 603-616.
- William Greene, 2004. "Fixed Effects and Bias Due to the Incidental Parameters Problem in the Tobit Model," Econometric Reviews, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 23(2), pages 125-147.
- Adam Wagstaff, 2010. "Estimating health insurance impacts under unobserved heterogeneity: the case of Vietnam's health care fund for the poor," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(2), pages 189-208.
- Jowett, M. & Contoyannis, P. & Vinh, N. D., 2003. "The impact of public voluntary health insurance on private health expenditures in Vietnam," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 333-342, January.
- Sapelli, Claudio & Vial, Bernardita, 2003.
"Self-selection and moral hazard in Chilean health insurance,"
Journal of Health Economics,
Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 459-476, May.
- Claudio Sapelli & Bernardita Vial, 2001. "Self Selection and Moral Hazard in Chilean Health Insurance," Documentos de Trabajo 195, Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile..
- Colm Harmon & Brian Nolan, 2001. "Health insurance and health services utilization in Ireland," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 10(2), pages 135-145.
- Ekman, Bjorn, 2007. "Catastrophic health payments and health insurance: Some counterintuitive evidence from one low-income country," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 83(2-3), pages 304-313, October.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36552For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ekkehart Schlicht).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

