Change of Prisoners’ Medical Seeking Behavior before and after Enrolling in National Health Insurance
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Chen, Po-Chung
Abstract
Background and objectives: Whether prisoners should be insured to national health insurance (NHI) or not had been an important issue in Taiwan for several years. Eventually, prisoners were insured as 4th category after the amendment of NHI Act in 2011. But there were several points in dispute about this new policy, one is the premium subsidies to prisoners. Is premium subsidies to prisoners reasonable to ordinary people? In other opinion, prisoners have to pay copayment for doctor visiting. May copayment play a barrier to overuse medical care? Furhter evaluation is needed to see the influence of the policy on prisoners. Method: The study employed self-administered structured questionnaire sampling prisoners who had experienced the period of before and after enrolling in NHI in two prisons in northern Taiwan. Systematic sampling with quota sampling were applied, and SPSS statistic software were used for data analysis. Result: Totally 1178 valid questionnaires were analyzed. Major results revealed that there were more frequent doctor visiting, more percentage of doctor visiting without worry, lower percentage of worrying about medical expense and medical quality, lower percentage of not receiving adequate medical care due to insufficient medical profession, increasing patient satisfaction and higher percentage of good or very good health perception after enrolling in NHI. There were significant difference in help-seeking behavior, frequency of doctor visiting, patient satisfaction and self-perceived health between different prisons. Prisoners who were older than 41 years old, poor health perception prior to their current incarceration and having family visiting every 2 weeks tended to request for doctor visiting. Prisoners who were older than 50 years old, self-perceived as moderate, poor and very poor health prior to their current incarceration had lower patient satisfaction. Prisoners who had self-perceived poor and very poor health prior to their current incarceration had poorer self-perceived perception before and after enrolling in NHI. Conclusion: The quality of medical care in prisons improved after enrolling in NHI. Prisoners had easier access to receive adequate treatment. Besides, there were improvement of patient satisfaction, health status and doctor visiting frequency. Thus, the policy that enrolling prisoners in NHI not only ensured prisoners’ right of medical care, align with the current universal trend, but also improved prisoners’ health status. The results of this study could be a reference for policy adjusting and advocating.
Subjects
prisoner
help-seeking behavior
patient satisfaction
self-perceived health
national health insurance (NHI)
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-104-R01848025-1.pdf
Size
23.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):16d962c2828596df28f09de8ae914637