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.

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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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