Treatment-seeking behaviour among persons with chronic diseases in Ghana: Does national health insurance status matter?

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the effect of national health insurance on the choice of healthcare facility among diabetic and hypertensive patients in Ghana. The data for this paper came from a secondary source, and the conditional mixed processing approach was utilised to investigate the influence of health insurance status on healthcare facility choice among diabetic and hypertension patients. The study reveals that when compared with uninsured individuals suffering from hypertension/diabetes, insured individuals are more likely to attend formal healthcare facilities and herbal clinics/hospitals and less likely to attend traditional/spiritual healing centres instead of chemical shop/self-care. This work addresses the problem of unobserved heterogeneity (selection bias) by employing the conditional mixed processing approach to account for the potential that health insurance is endogenous to the choice of healthcare facility, which if not accounted for might lead to biased estimates.

KEYWORDS:

• Treatment-seeking behaviour
• national health insurance
• chronic diseases

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• I11 and I13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The author reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.