مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بیمه سلامت دولت و تاثیرات فضایی نظیر (الزویر)

Despite a plethora of schemes that offer healthcare services completely free of costs or at a highly subsidized rate, take up of hospital care is very low, especially in developing countries. Two key reasons can explain this finding. First, there is a paucity of information about benefits and costs of treatment and second, there is also little ability to comprehend such information even if it were available, leading to lack of faith about hospital care (See Bauhoff et al., 2011, Jehu-Appiah et al., 2011; Rajasekhar et al., 2011). In such situations, patients often rely on anecdotal evidence from their peers or neighbors on the benefits of treatment. Health insurance has traditionally been viewed as a means to enable financial risk protection and improve access for patients and their families. Past evaluations of insurance programs have thus focused on how health insurance affects consumption smoothing, utilization of care by the insured and better health outcomes. We suggest another potential role of health insurance (especially in the case of universal health insurance schemes), which is its role in diffusing information on the benefits of treatment in hospitals. We thus postulate that in a setting where all residents are insured and can avail of healthcare benefits, peer effects from neighbors would lead to increased use of hospital care. In order to examine this hypothesis, we draw from the peer effects literature. In particular, we study the role of peer effects in technology diffusion i.e. the spread of an idea within a community. This depends upon the innovation itself, communication channels, time, and a social system. Oster and Thornton 2009, Bollinger and Gillingham 2012, and Conley and Udry 2005, show that there are strong peer effects in the adoption of different innovations such as menstrual cups, photovoltaic panels and new methods of pineapple farming in developing as well as developed country contexts. In the health literature, past work (for example, Sorensen, 2006; Fowler and Christakis, 2008; Cohen and Soto, 2007; Dahl et al., 2012; Godlonton and Thornton, 2012; Bodine-Baron et al., 2013) document peer effects in a variety of contexts related to decisions in taking paternity leave, obesity, HIV testing, vaccination and in choosing health plans. In our paper, we consider the introduction of a new health insurance scheme to be similar to a new technology that could potentially impact health outcomes.