Working Paper #2018-040
Health insurance and patient satisfaction: Evidence from the poorest regions of Vietnam
Even though health insurance is expanding rapidly in Vietnam, its
coverage is not effective. There remain inefficiencies in the healthcare
system with quality concerns, especially at primary care and in remote
areas. However, very little is known about how health insurance is
valued by people and whether health insurance coverage can translate
into quality healthcare. This paper investigates the relationship
between health insurance and patient satisfaction with medical care in
the poorest regions of Vietnam. We use multi-level models for ordinal
responses on a cross-sectional dataset of the poorest regions of Vietnam
in 2012. We find that it is not health insurance coverage per se but the
financial coverage that matters to improve patient satisfaction with
medical care. Patient satisfaction depends on the breadth and depth of
insurance coverage (i.e. services and medicines covered, co-payment rate
for each service) and the ability to use health insurance to reduce
medical costs via the co-payment mechanism.
- Keywords
-
- Health insurance
- patient satisfaction
- Vietnam
- JEL codes
-
- I13
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Leopold, N., Groot, W., Tomini, S., & Tomini, F. (2018). Health insurance and patient satisfaction: Evidence from the poorest regions of Vietnam (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2018-040). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=7992