IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/wbecrv/v33y2019i3p736-749..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effects of Health Insurance within Families: Experimental Evidence from Nicaragua

Author

Listed:
  • Anne Fitzpatrick
  • Rebecca Thornton

Abstract

This paper measures the causal effects of parent enrollment into voluntary health insurance on healthcare utilization among insured and uninsured children in Nicaragua. The study utilizes a randomized trial and age-eligibility cutoff in which insurance subsidies were randomly allocated to parents that covered their dependent children under 12; children age 12 and older were not eligible for coverage. Among eligible children, the insurance increased utilization at covered providers by 0.56 visits and increased overall utilization by 1.3 visits. Ineligible children with insured parents experienced 1.7 fewer healthcare visits driven by parent, not sibling, enrollment. The results suggest complementarities across healthcare provider type and provide evidence that households reallocate resources across all members in response to changes in healthcare prices for some.

Suggested Citation

  • Anne Fitzpatrick & Rebecca Thornton, 2019. "The Effects of Health Insurance within Families: Experimental Evidence from Nicaragua," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 33(3), pages 736-749.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:33:y:2019:i:3:p:736-749.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhx012
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Banerjee, Abhijit & Finkelstein, Amy & Hanna, Rema & Olken, Benjamin & Ornaghi, Arianna & Sumarto, Sudarno, 2020. "Subsidies and the Dynamics of Selection:Experimental Evidence from Indonesia's National Health Insurance," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 454, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    2. Abhijit Banerjee & Amy Finkelstein & Rema Hanna & Benjamin A. Olken & Arianna Ornaghi & Sudarno Sumarto, 2019. "The Challenges of Universal Health Insurance in Developing Countries: Evidence from a Large-scale Randomized Experiment in Indonesia," NBER Working Papers 26204, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Rabbani, Atonu & Mehareen, Jeenat & Chowdhury, Imran Ahmed & Sarker, Malabika, 2022. "Mandatory employer-sponsored health financing scheme for semiformal workers in Bangladesh: An experimental assessment," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 292(C).
    4. Abhijit Banerjee & Rema Hanna & Benjamin A Olken & Sudarno Sumarto, "undated". "The Challenges of Universal Health Insurance in Developing Countries: Evidence from a Large-scale Randomized Experiment in Indonesia," Working Papers 1994, Publications Department.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:33:y:2019:i:3:p:736-749.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/wrldbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.