Predicting Health Insurance Policy Subscription Intention: An Empirical Study

ABSTRACT

Though health insurance policies remain critical to eliminating healthcare access barriers, population-wide subscription in Ghana however remains unsatisfactory. Therefore, this study, while employing a questionnaire survey to elicit data (n= 312) analyzed via the structural equation modeling technique, investigates individual health insurance subscription underpinnings using the theory of planned behavior. The results of data analysis affirmed attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavior control as positively related to health insurance subscription. Similarly, results further revealed personal norm and descriptive norm as significantly related to intention, testifying to individuals’ subscription as not anchored on a single factor, but rather on a confluence of behavior-driven elements. The current study, in addition to affirming the TPB’s predictive potency, also enriches health insurance research, and underscores the much often-disregarded behavior constituents as imperative to health policy design and implementation. In view of the study results, implications for augmenting subscription, and suggestions for further research are subsequently delineated.

KEYWORDS:

• Health and social policy
• health insurance
• theory of planned behavior
• descriptive norm
• personal moral norm
• Ghana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in this study were reconcilable with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. In line with this declaration, which was amended in 2008, study participants were informed about the study purpose and consented accordingly.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all participants involved in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial assistance for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.