Understanding barriers to access and inequality in health care utilization
The aims of this work package are to identify the main barriers to health care access in a number of low and lower-middle income Asian countries and to explain inequalities in health care utilisation. Specific objectives are as follows:
- To provide evidence on the factors that determine health care utilization with the aim of identifying:
- the extent to which households are forced to forgo care when sick because it is not affordable;
- the impact of health insurance cover on health care utilization;
- the factors that lead households to rely on self-medication rather than seeking care from formal service providers.
- To identify the relative contribution of factors such as differences in health insurance cover and the geographic distribution of health care resources to income related inequality in health care utilization.
- To identify how the benifits from the scaling-up of public spending on health care would be distributed.