IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/36552.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of Health Insurance for Children: Evidence from Vietnam

Author

Listed:
  • Nguyen Viet, Cuong

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Nguyen Viet, Cuong, 2011. "The Impact of Health Insurance for Children: Evidence from Vietnam," MPRA Paper 36552, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36552
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/36552/1/MPRA_paper_36552.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. Jeffrey M Wooldridge, 2010. "Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 2, volume 1, number 0262232588, April.
    3. 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.
    4. World Bank, 2011. "World Development Report 2011 [Rapport sur le développement dans le monde 2011 : Conflits, sécurité et développement - Abrégé]," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 4389.
    5. 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, June.
    6. 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.
    7. 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, March.
    8. 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, April.
    9. 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.
    10. William Greene, 2004. "Fixed Effects and Bias Due to the Incidental Parameters Problem in the Tobit Model," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(2), pages 125-147.
    11. 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, February.
    12. 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.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Palmer, Michael & Mitra, Sophie & Mont, Daniel & Groce, Nora, 2015. "The impact of health insurance for children under age 6 in Vietnam: A regression discontinuity approach," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 217-226.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nguyen Viet Cuong, 2014. "Impact Evaluation of Health Insurance for Children: Evidence from a Developing Country," Working Papers 2014-180, Department of Research, Ipag Business School.
    2. Cuong Nguyen, 2016. "The impact of health insurance programs for children: evidence from Vietnam," Health Economics Review, Springer, vol. 6(1), pages 1-15, December.
    3. Ali, Shehzad & Cookson, Richard & Dusheiko, Mark, 2017. "Addressing care-seeking as well as insurance-seeking selection biases in estimating the impact of health insurance on out-of-pocket expenditure," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 127-140.
    4. Cuong Viet Nguyen, 2012. "The Impact Of Voluntary Health Insurance On Health Care Utilization And Out‐Of‐Pocket Payments: New Evidence For Vietnam," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 21(8), pages 946-966, August.
    5. Ha Trong Nguyen & Luke B Connelly, 2017. "Cost-sharing in health insurance and its impact in a developing country: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment," Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre Working Paper series WP1702, Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), Curtin Business School.
    6. Sarah Alkenbrack & Magnus Lindelow, 2015. "The Impact of Community‐Based Health Insurance on Utilization and Out‐of‐Pocket Expenditures in Lao People's Democratic Republic," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(4), pages 379-399, April.
    7. Sepehri, Ardeshir & Sarma, Sisira & Oguzoglu, Umut, 2011. "Does the financial protection of health insurance vary across providers? Vietnam's experience," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 73(4), pages 559-567, August.
    8. Arnab Acharya & Sukumar Vellakkal & Fiona Taylor & Edoardo Masset & Ambika Satija & Margaret Burke & Shah Ebrahim, 2013. "The Impact of Health Insurance Schemes for the Informal Sector in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 28(2), pages 236-266, August.
    9. Sheikh Aftaab Ul Maroof & Mohi-ud-Din Sangmi, 2021. "Assessing financial impact of a health intervention program and controlling spillover effects," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 48(1), pages 15-25, March.
    10. Sophie Mitra & Michael Palmer & Shannon Pullaro & Daniel Mont & Nora Groce, 2017. "Health Insurance and Children in Low- and Middle-income Countries: A Review," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 93(302), pages 484-500, September.
    11. 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, February.
    12. Adam Wagstaff, 2010. "Social health insurance reexamined," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(5), pages 503-517, May.
    13. Emily Gustafsson-Wright & Gosia Popławska & Zlata Tanović & Jacques Gaag, 2018. "The impact of subsidized private health insurance and health facility upgrades on healthcare utilization and spending in rural Nigeria," International Journal of Health Economics and Management, Springer, vol. 18(3), pages 221-276, September.
    14. Vo, Thang T. & Van, Pham Hoang, 2019. "Can health insurance reduce household vulnerability? Evidence from Viet Nam," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 1-1.
    15. Nguyen Viet, Cuong, 2014. "Impact Evaluation of Development Programmes and Policies: Experiences from Viet Nam," MPRA Paper 60919, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. He, Huajing & Nolen, Patrick J., 2019. "The effect of health insurance reform: Evidence from China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 168-179.
    17. 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.
    18. Budi Aji & Manuela De Allegri & Aurelia Souares & Rainer Sauerborn, 2013. "The Impact of Health Insurance Programs on Out-of-Pocket Expenditures in Indonesia: An Increase or a Decrease?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 10(7), pages 1-19, July.
    19. Lau, Siew Yee & Parinduri, Rasyad & Lee, Yoong Hon, 2019. "Does Social Health Insurance Help Owners of Micro- and Small Firms Cope with Family Hardships? Evidence from Indonesia," MPRA Paper 95295, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Nguyen Viet Cuong, 2015. "Impact Evaluation of Development Programmes and Policies: Experiences from Viet Nam," Working Papers 2015-620, Department of Research, Ipag Business School.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Child health insurance; impact evaluation; health care utilization; out-of-pocket spending; Vietnam;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • 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

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:36552. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joachim Winter (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.