The effects of Philhealth the insurance of [er capita health expenditures of households with senior citizens: who benefits and how much?
Date
2015
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Abstract
This study seeks to determine the marginal benefit of providing PhilHealth insurance coverage to senior citizens. We implement this by observing the insurance-induced changes in the average health spending of households with elderly members. Studies by Finkelstein, and Manning et al both showed positive correlation between health spending and health insurance. This paper tests the hypothesis that per capita health expenditures of households increase for each family member who are PhilHealth-insured elderly. We employ a family health per capita expenditure function defined by the status of the family
members‟ coverage on PhilHealth and other controlled relevant factors like age, gender, regions, income, and household head‟s highest educational attainment to isolate the effects of PhilHealth insurance. In line with this, the 2014 Annual Poverty Indicators Survey household level dataset from the Philippine Statistics Authority, which contains 10,469 household observations, is used. To observe for the effects of each variable considered in the function, we constructed a total of five models. We use the ordinary least squares method to estimate each of these models. The Hausman test is also conducted to compare the different models, and its results show that Model 4, containing the policy, age, income, household head education, and location variables, is the best among all of our models. Controlling for other factors, results show that households with senior citizens generally spend Php 5,736 more on healthcare compared to other age groups, and that households with PhilHealth- insured senior citizens spend Php 4,461 more on healthcare than those households with uninsured
elderly. Furthermore, findings show that households with senior citizens across all income groups experience approximately the same amount of increased per capita health spending of around Php 4,485, regardless of income. Finally, this study suggests that the current structure of PhilHealth insurance is not enough to fully bridge the gap on the average household health expenditures between the poor and the top-spending decile due to its nondiscriminatory nature with respect to income, as PhilHealth, while requiring varied amounts of premium depending on salary, offers the same amount of benefit to all income groups regardless.
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Senior citizen