Speaker
Description
Health care decisions are sometimes a matter of life and death, but also their financial consequences can be disastrous for many households around the world. While it is easy to imagine how the fear of making an expensive mistake may deter particularly poor households from making otherwise sensible health care choices, there is almost no scientific evidence on the importance and joint role of medical and financial uncertainty.
In this paper, we provide theoretical insights based on simulation exercises, introduce a novel measurement instrument for medical and cost uncertainty related to health investment choices, present data collected using this instrument from low-income households in Pakistan, and test the theoretical predictions using this data. As our own pre-studies indicated potentially large dividends to providing accurate information, we further included within-survey information interventions targeted at changing medical or cost uncertainty separately or jointly. With this RCT, we test in two intervention stages whether: i) the interventions reduce biases and uncertainties; ii) the interventions change the hypothetical health seeking decision; and iii) the joint intervention induces larger changes.
Our preliminary analysis reveals that both medical as well as cost uncertainty in health care decisions exists to a substantial degree. The empirical results regarding the influence of beliefs are largely in line with theoretical predictions and suggest that uncertainty in the financial dimension deters health investments.
