Ethnic and Religious Diversity as Determinants of Health Insurance Uptake in Ghana

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2011-06

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Fourth European Conference for African Studies (ECAS 4)

Abstract

Health insurance has been reckoned as an important health policy that serves to protect households from the direct financial consequences of health care use. In developing countries, health insurance, indeed, has emerged as an important mediating factor in providing relief to poor households hit by illness and requiring substantial health expenditure outlays. Uptake however has been a major problem for sustenance. We used a zero-inflated Poisson model which captures two decisions simultaneously; the decision to join an insurance scheme, and the number of people to insure in a household, to study the determinants of participation in Ghana’s health insurance scheme. The results show that ethnic and religious diversity are important factors that affect participation in a social health insurance scheme that is voluntary in participation and based on solidarity. With Ghana getting more and more diversified each passing day, due largely to internal migration and urbanisation, new ways of including people in the development process is imperative and studies such as this is important in providing the needed information. This result is instructive and shows that if Ghana is to make the health insurance policy benefit majority of its people especially in it’s largely less educated and increasingly urbanising societies, there is the need to massage the current design of the scheme to incorporate the sociocultural diversity of the communities which was neglected at the onset.

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Osei-Akoto, I., & Adamba, C. (2011, June). Ethnic and Religious Diversity as Determinants of Health Insurance Uptake in Ghana. In Fourth European Conference for African Studies (ECAS 4) (pp. 15-18)

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