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The effect of Ghana's National Health Insurance Scheme on health care utilisation
N J Blanchet1, G Fink, I Osei-Akoto
1Dept. of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, United States. nblanche@hsph.harvard.edu
Objectives:
The study investigates the effect of Ghana's National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) on health care utilisation.
Methods:
We provide a short history of health insurance in Ghana, and briefly discuss general patterns of enrolment in Ghana as well as in Accra in a first step. In a second step, we use data from the Women's Health Study of Accra wave II to evaluate the effect of insurance on health seeking behaviour using propensity score matching.
Results:
We find that on average individuals enrolled in the insurance scheme are significantly more likely to obtain prescriptions, visit clinics and seek formal health care when sick.
Conclusion:
These results suggest that the government's objective to increase access to the formal health care sector through health insurance has at least partially been achieved.
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