Europe and Central Asia's Great Post-Communist Social Health Insurance Experiment : Impacts on Health Sector and Labor Market Outcomes
The post-communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/10/8458168/europe-central-asias-great-post-communist-social-health-insurance-experiment-impacts-health-sector-labor-market-outcomes http://hdl.handle.net/10986/7382 |
| Summary: | The post-communist transition to social
health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European
and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to
try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate
over the relative merits of social health insurance and
tax-financed health systems. This paper employs a
regression-based generalization of the
difference-in-differences method and instrumental variables
on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990-2004.
The authors find that, controlling for any concurrent
provider payment reforms, adoption of social health
insurance increased national health spending and hospital
activity rates, but did not lead to better health outcomes.
The authors also find that adoption of social health
insurance reduced employment in the economy as a whole and
increased unemployment, although it did not apparently
increase the size of the informal economy. |
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