Speaker
Description
State-funded health insurance schemes are increasingly implemented in the Global South, but utilization and acceptance often remains lower than desired for Universal Health Coverage. Including features that address the beneficiary population’s preferences could improve this. We conducted a Discrete Choice Experiment to elicit preferences for a new public outpatient health insurance for low-income households in Pakistan at scheme design stage. We included five attributes that reflected the dimensions of real policy trade-offs during scheme design: healthcare providers, services, health conditions, coverage amount and premium. The main effects reveal relevance of all attributes and strong preferences for including higher-level healthcare providers as well as telemedicine and for covering chronic disease needs. We see suggestive evidence that even in a setting with low insurance literacy, choices regarding which health conditions to cover were made to maximise benefits along known, pre-existing health complaints and risk-factors. We do not detect substantial heterogeneity in preferences across socio-demographic strata, respondent and household health status, indicating rather homogenous preferences.
