Browsing by Author "Cui, Robin Martin"

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    Beyond connectivity: why internet access and Philhealth coverage operate independently in Philippine healthcare utilization
    (2025-12-16) Cui, Robin Martin; Go Tian, Anthony Joshua; Solon, Orville Jose C.
    This paper examines the determinants of healthcare utilization in the Philippines, focusing on the roles of insurance coverage, digital access, and socioeconomic factors. Prior studies suggest that insurance and digital connectivity independently increase healthcare access when controlling for educational attainment, wealth quintile, age, urban residence, access barriers, marital status, number of living children, and employment status. (Finkelstein et al. 2012; Dorsey & Topol 2016). However, evidence on their interaction effects and distributional impacts in low- and middle-income countries remains limited. This paper integrates Grossman's health capital model (1972), Gertler and van der Gaag's full price theory (1990), and Veinot et al. (2018) and Crawford (2020) digital determinants framework (2005) to frame the research question from which an empirical model is derived. This empirical model is estimated using 2022 Philippine National Demographic and Health Survey data (N = 27,813) following multinomial logistic regression with cluster-robust standard errors. Results suggest that after controlling for illness severity and demographic factors, PhilHealth coverage is associated with higher face-to-face consultation odds by 94.2% (p = 0.04), but internet access shows no significant independent effect (p =0.070), and the two operate independently rather than synergistically (p = 0.143). Policy simulations quantify these effects at scale: achieving universal PhilHealth coverage would increase consultation rates by 0.27 percentage points (pp) , universal internet by 0.15 pp, and both combined by 0.37 pp, leaving 88.48 percent of ill women without care and demonstrating negative complementarity (-0.06 pp). These findings imply that expanding internet infrastructure alone will not translate into increased healthcare utilization without complementary policies addressing affordability, digital literacy, and institutional integration of telemedicine within the national health insurance framework.