The Effect of Universal Health Care on the Out-Of-Pocket Health Expenditures: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Muhammad Asali and Valida Pantsulaia
Additional contact information
Valida Pantsulaia: National Bank of Georgia

No 15494, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In the first two quarters of 2013 the Georgian government introduced and fully implemented a universal health care (UHC) plan covering all those not-yet publicly or privately insured. We estimate the effect of the introduction of the universal healthcare plan on the level of out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditures of households. We find that the program saved households an economically and statistically significant amount of 92 GEL per household/ month: a major effect, amounting to about 10% of the average household monthly income and 30% of the average individual monthly income at the time. The OOP payments reduction is almost totally attributed to people utilizing serious, emergency, or life-saving inpatient and outpatient services—lending support to the hypothesis that the UHC program, not only has reduced the OOP health expenditures, but it might have also improved the overall health status in the country.

Keywords: universal healthcare; out of pocket health expenditures; public health; health insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I13 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15494.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp15494

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().