Advancing Universal Health Coverage in the COVID-19 Era: An Assessment of Public Health Services Technical Efficiency and Applied Cost Allocation in Cambodia

Robert John Kolesar (), Peter Bogetoft, Vanara Chea, Guido Erreygers and Sambo Pheakdey
Additional contact information
Robert John Kolesar: Abt Associates, UA - University of Antwerp, Cambodian Ministry of Economy and Finance, CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - IRD - Institut de Recherche pour le Développement - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UCA - Université Clermont Auvergne
Vanara Chea: Cambodian Ministry of Economy and Finance
Sambo Pheakdey: Cambodian Ministry of Economy and Finance

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: COVID-19 is causing serious impacts on tax revenue and consequentially on public health budgets. This study assesses Cambodia's public health services technical efficiency, unit costs, and utilization rates to quantify the extent to which current health financing can accommodate the expansion of social health protection coverage. Overall, for the public health system to be fully efficient output would need to increase by 34 and 73 percent for hospitals and health centers, respectively. We find public sector service quality, private sector providers, and non-discretionary financing to be statistically significant factors affecting technical efficiency. This study pioneers the application of Data Envelopment Analysis-Aumann-Shapley applied cost allocation to the health sector, enabling unit cost estimation for the major social health insurance payment categories. We estimate there is potential supply-side 'service space' to expand population coverage to an additional 4.69 million social health insurance beneficiaries with existing financing if the public health system were fully efficient.

Keywords: health service efficiency; social health protection; costing; cost allocation; Universal Health Coverage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-sea
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://uca.hal.science/hal-03437398v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://uca.hal.science/hal-03437398v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Advancing universal health coverage in the COVID-19 era: an assessment of public health services technical efficiency and applied cost allocation in Cambodia (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03437398

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().