Social protection and demand for health care among children in the Philippines

Issue Date

2017

Abstract

The Philippines recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provides conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enrolls them into the government’s social health insurance program. This has resulted to dramatic increase in health insurance coverage, especially among the poor. In this paper, we empirically assess the joint impact of the two programs on the healthcare demand for children. Overall, we find encouraging impacts of social protection on the demand for healthcare services. While we find no direct impact on morbidity, our results suggest that the social health insurance and the CCT program jointly were able to induce greater hospital visits for both preventive and curative care, and lowers out-of-pocket expenditures. However, we also document possible leakages in the government’s programs, as well as potential indication of healthcare service differentiation based on quality. Both these concerns may undermine the expected outcomes of the country’s social protection programs.

Source or Periodical Title

Philippine Journal of Development

Volume

44

Issue

1

Page

45-70

Document Type

Article

College

College of Development Communication (CDC)

Physical Description

illustrations; tables

Language

English

Subject

Social protection; Medical care

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