Community-based health insurance schemes are becoming increasingly recognized as a potential strategy to achieve universal health coverage in developing countries. Despite great efforts to improve accessibility to modern health-care services in the past two decades, in Ethiopia, utilization of health-care services have remained very low. Given the financial barriers of the poor households and lack of sustainable health-care financing mechanisms in the country has been recognized to be major factors, the country has implemented community-based health insurance in piloted regions of Ethiopia aiming to improve utilization of health-care services by removing financial barriers. However, there is a dearth of literature regarding the effect of the implemented insurance scheme on the utilization of health-care services.
To analyze the effects of a community-based health insurance scheme on the utilization of health-care services in Yirgalem town, southern Ethiopia.
The study used both a quantitative and qualitative mixed approach using a comparative cross-sectional study design for a quantitative part using a randomly selected sample of 405 (135 member and 270 non-member) household heads. To complement the findings from the household survey, focus group discussions were used. Multivariate logistic regression was employed to identify the effect of community-based health insurance on health-care utilization.