Three Essays on Health Insurance and Health Outcomes in Indonesia

This thesis aims to quantitatively analyse the role of health insurance and behaviour on health outcomes using nationally representative data from Indonesia. The first chapter examines the potential behavioural factors that may influence adult obesity and shows that being overweight is associated with impatience. The second chapter investigates whether access to public insurance reduces out-of-pocket health spending (OOP), and finds that public insurance for the poor significantly reduced OOP spending. The third chapter analyses the association between health outcomes and loss of health insurance and finds that individuals who lost health insurance were less likely to be healthy.