Social Protection and Demand for Health Care Among Children in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines has recently introduced two distinct but related large-scale social protection programs that, first, provide conditional cash transfers (CCT) to poor households, and, second, automatically enroll them into the government’s social health insurance program. This has resulted in dramatic increase in health insurance coverage, especially among the poor. This paper assesses the joint impact of the two programs on the healthcare demand for children. Overall, the study finds encouraging impacts on the demand for healthcare services. While no direct impact on morbidity was found, results suggest that the social health insurance and the CCT program jointly induced greater hospital visits for both preventive and curative care, and lowered out-of-pocket expenditures. However, the study also documents possible implementation failures in the government’s programs, as well as potential indication of healthcare service differentiation based on quality. Both these concerns may undermine the expected outcomes of the country’s social protection programs.