Factors that influence individuals to join a health insurance scheme to pay for health

Abstract

There are several literature reviews that enlighten about the subject of individuals joining health insurance schemes to pay for their health in Uganda. However, the intriguing aspect is whether the influence of factors that affect the uptake of health insurance schemes to pay for health has remained consistent in recent times. This study uses National Household Survey (NHS) data from the 2019/2020 Uganda National Household Survey, focusing on health insurance uptake among different households. We assess variations in health insurance uptake patterns based on demographic and economic characteristics of the different individuals, employing multinominal logistic regression within a survey design. Our study findings reveal that individuals of high wealth status (Quintiles 5 and 4) are most likely to uptake health insurance, hence positive progress in this section. We observed that marital status also highly influences health insurance uptake among households especially those that were married monogamously (51.19%) and not yet married (30.81%), also observed that increased chances of health insurance uptake among households in central region and those that had attained higher education levels ( primary, secondary and post-secondary). On the contrary, we noted that health insurance uptake was low in distant regions. And was also low among the elderly population and the very young. In conclusion, it’s important to know that these factors varied across the period of study. Based on these findings, more efforts to increase on health insurance scheme uptake to pay for health among households in Uganda should prioritize; i) creating poverty reduction strategies and income policies, ii) extending insurance coverage to those with non-communicable diseases (NCD), iii) Improving levels of education to create awareness about health insurance coverage.