Gender Disparities in Utilization of Government Health Insurance in India

Using administrative data on over 4 million hospital visits, Radhika Jain documents striking gender disparities within a government health insurance program that entitles 46 million poor individuals to free hospital care in Rajasthan, India. Females account for only 33 percent of hospital visits among children and 43 percent among the elderly. These shares are lower for more expensive types of care, and far lower than sex differences in illness prevalence can explain. Almost two-thirds of non-childbirth program spending is on males. She combines these data with patient survey, census, and electoral data to show that 1) the program does not fully offset the costs of care-seeking, which leads to disparities in utilization because households are willing to allocate more resources to male than female health; 2) lowering costs does not reduce disparities because males benefit as much as females do; and 3) long-term exposure to village-level female leaders reduces the gender gap in utilization, but effects are modest and limited to girls and young women. In the presence of gender bias, increasing access to and subsidizing social services may increase levels of female utilization but fail to address gender inequalities without actions that specifically target females.

About the Speaker:

Radhika Jain is the Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow for 2019-2022 at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University. Her research focuses on health care markets, the effectiveness of public health policy, and gender disparities in health. She completed her doctorate in the Department of Global Health at Harvard University in 2019. Her dissertation examined the extent to which government subsidies for health care under insurance are captured by private hospitals instead of being passed through to patients, and whether accountability measures can help patients claim their entitlements. Jain's research has been supported by grants from the Weiss Family Fund and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). She has worked on impact evaluations of health programs in India and on the implementation of HIV programs across several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. She also held a doctoral fellowship at the Center for Global Development. At Shorenstein APARC, she is starting new work on understanding the factors that contribute to poor female health outcomes and interventions to increase the effectiveness of public health insurance.