How Does the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect People's Willingness to Pay for Health in the Short and Long Term? A Longitudinal Study during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic in China.

Wei Song,Ershuai Huang,Taiyang Zhao

doi:10.3390/ijerph19031568

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a substantial threat to people’s lives and aroused health concerns. This study aims at exploring the following questions. First, how does the COVID-19 pandemic affect people’s willingness to pay for health (WPH) in the short and long term? Second, what is the psychological mechanism underlying such an effect? Finally, what are the boundary conditions for this effect? To answer these questions, we conducted three longitudinal surveys. The first survey was launched in February 2020—the time of the most serious outbreak of COVID-19 in China. Data were obtained from 1548 participants through questionnaires on an online survey platform. The sample covered 297 prefecture-level cities in 31 provincial administrative regions. Subsequently, we conducted two follow-up surveys in August 2020 and July 2021. The samples of these surveys were randomly selected from the sample of the first survey. The findings showed that the pandemic promoted people’s WPH in the outbreak period. The fear of death and self-esteem mediated and moderated this effect, respectively. Moreover, the effect persisted for six months after the COVID-19 pandemic had been brought under control (August 2020). However, the effect disappeared after a year and a half (July 2021). These results indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic promoted people’s WPH and that this effect was sustained in the short term after the pandemic had been brought under control but not in the long term.

Highlights

At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has been ravaging the world for two years
Most of the existing literature has primarily focused on the negative impacts of the pandemic, such as anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [17,18]; this study focuses on the positive effects of the pandemic and has a more constructive value for public health policy
How does the COVID-19 pandemic affect people’s willingness to pay for health (WPH) in the short and long term? Second, what is the psychological mechanism underlying such an effect? what are the boundary conditions for this effect? To answer these questions, we constructed a theoretical model in which the severity of the pandemic (SP) acts as the independent variable, WPH as the dependent variable, the fear of death (FD) as the mediating variable, and self-esteem as the moderating variable

Summary

Introduction

At the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has been ravaging the world for two years. In those years, how the pandemic has affected the health behaviors of individuals has become a controversial issue. Other studies have found that the pandemic improved residents’ health awareness [9,10] and self-protective behaviors [11,12]. During the outbreak period, the aforementioned healthy and unhealthy behaviors might constitute situational responses to the threat caused by the pandemic [2,11]. The long-term impact of the pandemic on residents’ health

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Discussion

Conclusion