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Role of government sponsored health insurance schemes in improving healthcare access and reducing household out-of-pocket payment for inpatient care

Debasis Barik, National Council for Applied Economic Research
Santanu Pramanik, National Council of Applied Economic Research, India
Sonalde B. Desai, University of Maryland

Healthcare spending in India is pre-dominantly met through out-of-pocket spending by the households. The central and different state governments have introduced a number of health insurance schemes (GSHIS) to protect the poor and vulnerable population from incurring catastrophic payments for health. Using the data from the Delhi Metropolitan Area Study, we have tried to assess the impact of these GSHIS to increase the demand for inpatient care and reduce the OOP spending on healthcare. Since these schemes were targeted to the poor, we have matched the households from the treatment group using propensity score matching to reach to the unbiased estimate of the treatment effect. Preliminary findings suggests that the GSHIS did not affect the likelihood of a household to report inpatient OOP or catastrophic inpatient payment. The OOP payment for inpatient care has declined only marginally among the GSHIS beneficiary households.

Keywords: Health and morbidity, Economic analysis, Policy evaluation

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P6.