MR Microinsurance_2012_03_29.indd - International Labour ...

160 Health insurance
7.2 Search of relevant WTP experiments
To achieve a successful launch of HMI, it is important to understand WTP
relative to the stakeholders’ context. The three issues that are of particular concern
are: 1) what are the difficulties associated with predicting WTP when the
investigation has to be performed before the respondents can actually buy
HMI? 2) Which variables explain the differences in WTP across households in
the same location, and across different locations and points in time? And 3) how
can reliable and comparable WTP estimates be obtained with minimal investment
of time and money?
With the purpose of reviewing what has been done in this regard, we conducted
several searches of literature in 2010, including a search of MEDLINE
database; search terms included: “WTP” or “willingness to pay” and “health
insurance”: 179 hits came up; a refined search was based on crossing the keyword
“willingness to pay” with “health insurance” or “prepayment-health” and
one of the following keywords: “developing countries”; “Asia”; “Africa”; “Latin
America”; “low income”; “poor”; “microinsurance”; or “CBHI (communitybased
health insurance)”. 18 articles that were relevant for the topic “WTP for
health insurance in low-income countries” were retained. We also scanned the
references of the above-mentioned articles to identify additional papers that
did not come up in the online searches; two articles were identified (one on a
study conducted in Pakistan and the other in Cameroon) bringing the total to
20 articles.
A detailed screening of the articles revealed that three experiments were
reported by more than one article, and thus this chapter is based on 14
experimental field studies eliciting WTP for health insurance among lowincome
persons in developing countries, but on 20 papers. The countries
included Burkina Faso (five articles), Cameroon, China (two articles),
Ethiopia (two articles), Ghana, India (two articles), Islamic Republic of Iran,
Namibia, Nigeria (two articles), Pakistan, United Republic of Tanzania and
Viet Nam.
Table 7.2 summarizes the elicitation methods used in the field studies. All
researchers used the CV approach, but with notable differences in the method to
elicit the WTP and the definitions of various parameters.