Abstract
BackgroundHealth insurance is an essential aspect of healthcare. This is because it enables the insured to acquire timely and essential healthcare services, besides offering financial protection from catastrophic treatment costs. This paper seeks to establish gender differentials and determinants of health insurance coverage in Zambia.MethodsThe data used in this study was obtained from the 2018 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. Data were analyzed using STATA 13.0 software and focused on descriptive and Probit regression analyses.ResultsThe study reveals that for women and men, age, wealth category, education, and professional occupation are positively associated with health insurance while being self-employed in the agricultural sector negatively influences health insurance coverage for both sexes. Other variables have gender-specific effects. For instance, being in marital union and having a clerical occupation increases the probability of having health insurance for women while being in the services, skilled, and unskilled manual occupations increases the probability of having health insurance for men. Further, residing in rural areas reduces the probability of having health insurance for men.ConclusionThe study concludes that there are differences in factors that influence health insurance between women and men. Hence, this study highlights the need to enhance health insurance coverage by addressing the different factors that influence health insurance coverage among men and women. These factors include enhancing education, job creation, diversifying insurance schemes, and gender consideration in the design of National Health Insurance Scheme.
Highlights
Health insurance is an essential aspect of healthcare
The results of this study are in tandem with the findings of Wang et al [3] who observed that health insurance coverage in most developing countries was less than 5% and that the gender gap in health insurance coverage favored men
The results indicate that some occupations are associated with an increase in the probability of signing up for health insurance while others decrease the probability of health insurance coverage
Summary
Health insurance is an essential aspect of healthcare This is because it enables the insured to acquire timely and essential healthcare services, besides offering financial protection from catastrophic treatment costs. Women face greater challenges in the market for health insurance and are more likely to have higher direct healthcare expenses in comparison to men [4] This poses a challenge to the realization of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 3, aimed at “ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all at all ages” and in particular target 3.8, which focuses on “achieving universal health coverage, including financial risk protection, access to quality essential healthcare services and access to safe, effective, quality and affordable essential medicines and vaccines for all” [5]. It is a widely acknowledged fact that an efficient health financing system is critical to the achievement of UHC [6, 7]
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