The Multiple Effects of Child Health Insurance in Vietnam

This paper estimates multiple effects of tremendous expansion in health insurance coverage for children on medical services utilizations for both children and parents by focusing on Free Care for Children Under Six, a child health insurance program that provides free access to health care practices for children under 6 in Vietnam. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds that child health insurance has considerable positive effects on children’s health care uses whereas it reduces parental health care utilization for some outcomes. In particular, child health health insurance increases the probabilities of public inpatient visit and private outpatient visit by 22.3% and 33% respectively while it rises the frequencies of public inpatient visits and private outpatient visits by 0.32 times and 2.24 times respectively. In contrast, child health insurance reduces a mother’s probabilities of public inpatient visit and public outpatient visit by 32.6% and 27% respectively, number of public inpatient visits by 0.41 times. Also, paternal impacts of child health insurance consists of a 23.2% reduction in the probability of private outpatient visit and a 1.01 time decrease in the frequency of private outpatient visits. The paper significantly provides a more insightful understanding of various impacts of a health policy on health care utilization from developing countries.