Research of factors impressed access to health insurance of migrant workers in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

Migrant workers constitute a relatively large proportion of the total population in general and the labor force in particular in Ho Chi Minh City. Research on social security for this group is an issue that needs to be paid attention to, in which health insurance is one of the important policies in the social security system being applied in our country. This article will study the issue of health insurance for migrant workers. By deploying the qualitative research method, the author researches the opportunity of accessing health insurance of migrant workers in Ho Chi Minh City, in particular, using the expert method to collect opinions on the questionnaire, using the direct survey method on 512 workers to build a database for the analysis in the article. The study results show that 93% of the surveyed migrant workers have health insurance, 73% of which have access to policy benefits. However, some barriers inhibit the opportunity of participating in and benefitting from health insurance of migrant workers, such as (i) proper perception of enterprises greatly affects the participation in health insurance of employees; (ii) ignorance and lack of information of employees on the health insurance policy; (iii) inconvenience of regulations about where participants access the healthcare system; (iv) time for medical examination and treatment associated with health insurance has not created favorable conditions for employees; (v) the overcrowding of public hospitals is accompanied by a poor-quality service, diminishing the participant's trust. Specifically, the article indicates that household registration is not a factor affecting the access to health insurance of migrant workers, which is different from other studies on the same topic. That is, household registration in Ho Chi Minh City makes no difference in accessing health insurance.