Abstract
Introduction: Social health insurance programme was initiated in Nigeria with one of the aims being to improve the demand for quality healthcare services with a resultant reduction in catastrophic spending among the citizenry. Unfortunately, in this programme, healthcare providers who offer quality healthcare services still witness poor enrollee demand for services which has led to inability of the programme to achieve its set out objectives. Hence, the need to study the effects of selected critical determinants on demand for health insurance services and how much these determinants can collectively account for the demand for services in the programme. Design/Methodology: The study adopted a cross sectional design with a quantitative approach. The sample size was calculated using G - Power 3.1 software and the determined sample for the study was one thousand four hundred and thirty five (1435). Multistage sampling method was adopted. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and linear regression method with the aid of SPSS version 11. Result: The critical determinants of provider ownership, distance to healthcare provider, enrollee educational level have significant positive effect on the demand for health insurance services (<0.05) but the effect of enrollee income was positively insignificant (>0.05). Similarly, 75% of the changes in demand for health insurance services can be accounted for by the predictor variables in this study. Conclusion: The inability of the programme to address these selected critical determinants significantly will lead to out of pocket spending for healthcare services with a resultant catastrophic effect on families’ finances. Therefore, there is a need to take into account the effects of these determinants duringpolicy formulation, reviews and process implementation in the programme.
Highlights
Social health insurance programme was initiated in Nigeria with one of the aims being to improve the demand for quality healthcare services with a resultant reduction in catastrophic spending among the citizenry
Many years after the initiation of social health insurance programme in Nigeria, the challenges bedeviling the programme which includes but not limited to progressive decline in demand for health insurance services has not been adequately addressed by the relevant authorities [7, 8]
Catastrophic spending usually arises whenever an enrollee fails to demand for health insurance services and pays for health services from out of pocket and which tilt the enrollee into poverty [32, 33]
Summary
Social health insurance programme was initiated in Nigeria with one of the aims being to improve the demand for quality healthcare services with a resultant reduction in catastrophic spending among the citizenry. Many years after the initiation of social health insurance programme in Nigeria, the challenges bedeviling the programme which includes but not limited to progressive decline in demand for health insurance services has not been adequately addressed by the relevant authorities [7, 8]. This demand for health insurance services is influenced by those factors that will eventually determine how and when an enrollee identifies that there is illness and is able to procure the needed healthcare services [9]
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