Impact evaluation of India's ‘Yeshasvini’ community‐based health insurance programme
采用倾向得分匹配法，评估印度Yeshasvini社区健康保险对医疗服务利用、经济保护及健康结果的影响，发现其提高了服务利用并降低了自付费用，但效果因社会经济群体而异。
Using propensity score matching techniques, the study evaluates the impact of India's Yeshasvini community-based health insurance programme on health-care utilisation, financial protection, treatment outcomes and economic well-being. The programme offers free out-patient diagnosis and lab tests at discounted rates when ill, but, more importantly, it covers highly catastrophic and less discretionary in-patient surgical procedures. For its impact evaluation, 4109 randomly selected households in villages in rural Karnataka, an Indian state, were interviewed using a structured questionnaire. A comprehensive set of indicators was developed and the quality of matching was tested. Generally, the programme is found to have increased utilisation of health-care services, reduced out-of-pocket spending, and ensured better health and economic outcomes. More specifically, however, these effects vary across socio-economic groups and medical episodes. The programme operates by bringing the direct price of health-care down but the extent to which this effectively occurs across medical episodes is an empirical issue. Further, the effects are more pronounced for the better-off households. The article demonstrates that community insurance presents a workable model for providing high-end services in resource-poor settings through an emphasis on accountability and local management.