Socio-economic Disparities in Health Care Seeking Behaviour, Health Expenditure and Its Source of Financing in Orissa

Abstract

Over the years various plans and programmes have been initiated and implemented by the state government of Orissa. But, state’s health indicators have not improved substantially. Moreover, in recent years, health seeking behaviour of the people has been affected due to increasing cost of health care. Health care is not free of cost any more due to introduction of user fee, increasing trend of privatization and the technological innovation. As a result, out of pocket expenditure has increased enormously affecting the socio-economically disadvantaged groups the most. In consequence, they tend to depend more upon borrowing, dis-saving, selling valuable assets and curtailing expenditure on education of their children. Hence, in this paper we try to investigate broadly into three main aspects, namely, health seeking behaviour, health care burden and most importantly the source of financing of their health expenditure across socio-economic groups by using bi-variate and regression techniques (logit) to provide policy suggestions with respect to health care financing, especially focusing health insurance. Our findings show that there exists a statistical significant difference in health seeking behaviour, health expenditure and financing health care among socio-economic groups. Socio-economic groups fall behind in terms of health care utilization and experiencing higher health care burden as well as depending more on inefficient mechanism to finance their health expenditure. Hence, we advocate that state government should increase its expenditure share towards health sector substantially to achieve desired outcomes and also provide comprehensive health insurance to the targeted socio-economic backward groups.