New Health Insurance Data Have Been Reported by R. Joshi and Co-Authors (Government health insurance and spatial peer effects: New evidence from…

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New Health Insurance Data Have Been Reported by R. Joshi and Co-Authors (Government health insurance and spatial peer effects: New evidence from India)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Weekly News -- Research findings on Health Insurance are discussed in a new report. According to news reporting from Maharashtra, India, by VerticalNews journalists, research stated, "What is the role of spatial peers in diffusion of information about health care? We use the implementation of a health insurance program in Karnataka, India that provided free tertiary care to poor households to explore this issue. We use administrative data on location of patient, condition for which the patient was hospitalized and date of hospitalization (10,507 observations) from this program starting November 2009 to June 2011 for 19 months to analyze spatial and temporal clustering of tertiary care."

Funders for this research include University of Southern California, IIM.

The news correspondents obtained a quote from the research, "We find that the use of healthcare today is associated with an increase in healthcare use in the same local area (group of villages) in future time periods and this association persists even after we control for (1) local area fixed effects to account for time invariant factors related to disease prevalence and (2) local area specific time fixed effects to control for differential trends in health and insurance related outreach activities. In particular, we find that 1 new hospitalization today results in 0.35 additional future hospitalizations for the same condition in the same local area. We also document that these effects are stronger in densely populated areas and become pronounced as the insurance program becomes more mature suggesting that word of mouth diffusion of information might be an explanation for our findings."

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: "We conclude by discussing implications of our results for healthcare policy in developing economies."

For more information on this research see: Government health insurance and spatial peer effects: New evidence from India. Social Science & Medicine, 2018;196():131-141. Social Science & Medicine can be contacted at: Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, England. (Elsevier - www.elsevier.com; Social Science & Medicine - www.journals.elsevier.com/social-science-and-medicine/)

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting R. Joshi, Gokhale Inst Polit & Econ, Pune 411004, Maharashtra, India. Additional authors for this research include C. Chatterjee, N. Sood and P. Boregowda.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.021. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

Keywords for this news article include: Maharashtra, India, Asia, Health and Medicine, Health Insurance.