The impact of household’s insurance coverage on health care financial protection

Abstract

The Vietnamese Government implemented the Law on Health Insurance in 2009, aimed at achieving Universal Health Coverage by 2014. However, we only achieved 60% of population coverage in 2010 and evidences of health insurance impacts were reported weakly. The main objective of this study is to determine the impact of health insurance coverage within a household on health care financial protection. We used the data from the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) in 2010. Logit regression, OLS and quantile regression were employed to investigate the associated factors with catastrophic health care spending and out-of-pocket expenditure as a proportion of household capacity to pay (OOP/CTP). The main findings of this study are that higher health insurance coverage rate within a household was found to be associated with lower probability of catastrophic health expenditure and reduced the out-of-pocket (OOP) spending as a proportion of household capacity to pay, especially for those in the upper tail of OOP distribution. More members in the households, living in the rural areas and higher asset index score are associated with lower rate of catastrophic encountering; while more elderly and children in households increases the chances of incurring catastrophic health spending for a household.