Health Insurance and the Economic Impact of Negative Health Outcomes in Ghana
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Date
2021-08-23
Authors
Novignon, Jacob
Arthur, Eric
Nonvignon, Justice
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
African Economic Research Consortium
Abstract
In many developing countries, financial risk protection for health is underdeveloped
and negative health outcomes can be impoverishing. In this study, we sought to
investigate the impact of negative health outcomes on household welfare and the role
of public health insurance in mitigating this impact. We used Ghana’s public-funded
National Health Insurance Scheme as a case study. Data was from the sixth round of
the Ghana Living Standards survey (GLSS). To address the potentially non-random
nature of the Ghana health insurance scheme, a two-stage least squares (2SLS)
estimation technique was used. The results suggest that longer days of illness leads
to less hours of labour supply and this result was statistically significant across all
specifications. We found no evidence of heterogeneous impact of negative health
outcomes through health insurance coverage on hours of labour supply. However,
disaggregating the results into the urban and rural, and the gender samples, we
find that for rural dwellers and males who experienced longer days of illness, labour
supply was less when they had access to health insurance. The findings call for policy
that focuses on reforming the NHIS to ensure effectiveness and achieving its primary
objectives. One option is to ensure availability of prescription drugs and to enhance
the procedure for accessing services at healthcare centres to encourage participation
and continuous renewal of subscription by Ghanaians.
Description
Keywords
Health insurance, , health outcomes, , labour supply, , Ghana