Europe and Central Asia's Great Post-communist Social Health Insurance Experiment : Aggregate Impacts on Health Sector 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 social health insurance and tax-financed health systems. This paper employs regression-based generalizations of the difference-in-differences method on panel data from 28 countries for the period 1990-2004. We 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.

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Wagstaff, Adam, Moreno-Serra, Rodrigo
Format:	Journal Article biblioteca
Language:	EN
Published:	2009
Subjects:	National Government Expenditures and Health H510, Analysis of Health Care Markets I110, Health: Government Policy, Regulation, Public Health I180, Economic Development: Human Resources, Human Development, Income Distribution, Migration O150, Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions: Consumer Economics, Health, Education and Training: Welfare, Income, Wealth, and Poverty P360,
Online Access:	http://hdl.handle.net/10986/5014
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