Awareness and affordability of the newly proposed social health insurance among public servants in ARba Minch Town, SNNPR, Ethiopia/2019.
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Date
2019-06
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Addis Abeba University
Abstract
Background: As part of the efforts being made to meet universal health coverage, Ethiopia plans
to introduce social health insurance (SHI) scheme for the formal sector. Contribution will be
collected as 3% of employee’s gross salary from both employee and employer, despite that the
scheme is expected to enhance access to healthcare, there is a concern that the premium may not
be affordable to majority of civil servants and there could be limited interest to join the scheme.
Therefore, this study aims to assess awareness and affordability of the newly proposed social
health insurance among public servants in Arba Minch town, South Ethiopia.
Methods and material
Cross-sectional study designed was used among randomly selected 713 public servant at Arba
Minch town. The survey participates were selected based on multistage stratified random sampling
method. Data was collected via structured questioner, then it was cleaned, coded, entered in to EPI
data v.3.1 and exported to SPSS version 25 statistical package for analysis. Descriptive statistics
used to summarize awareness and affordability of the scheme and both bivariate and multivariable
logistic regression was used to examine factors driving the outcome variables. Odd and 95% CI
was used to report the finding.
Result
The study revealed that half of the participants never heard of social health insurance. Working
sector, regularly listening for health information through mass media and participation in social
network are significantly positively associated with awareness of SHI. From the total survey
participants, 607 (87.7%) respondents are able to afford the 3% of gross salary per month as
scheme premium. Educational status, family size and net income were significantly explains
affordability to the scheme. Among the total respondents, 254 (36.7%) are willing to join for the
scheme and interest to join the scheme is affected by awareness of the scheme, household size,
regularly listening for health information and participation in social network.
Conclusion and recommendation
The study revealed that affordability to health insurance would not be a serious challenge to
introduced SHI for the formal sector. The major problems are found to be limited knowledge about
the design of health issuance and willingness to participate in the scheme. Half of the respondents
were never heard of social health insurance. Although more than three fourth were able to afford,
majority were not willing to join the scheme. Therefore, it is better to work hard on public
awareness of the scheme. The evidence from this research indicates that provision of health
information on mass media could be used as one strategy to enhance understanding of health
insurance and to change perception on SHI scheme.
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Keywords
Social health insurance