Efficiency and Satisfaction Evaluation of Thailand's Universal Health Care in Meeting the Millenium Development Goals

Pisit Leeahtam ； Jittaporn Sriboonjit ； Songsak Sriboonchitta ； Prasert Chaitip ； Chukiat Chaiboonsri ； Peter H. Calkins

《International Journal of Intelligent Technologies and Applied Statistics》 4卷3期 (2011/09) Pp. 303-326

https://doi.org/10.6148/IJITAS.2011.04.03.01

並列摘要

Universal health care is potentially the central policy for the direct realization of the three Millenium Development Goals that concern health, as well as a strong indirect contributor to meeting the five other MDGs. Although Thailand has one of the rare universal health care programs in the developing world, its progress in meeting the health and non-health MDGs has been mixed. To provide insights into why, this case study focused on patients' satisfaction with primary health care services and product provision for urban and remote communities in Chiang Mai province. Ordered probit models with the associated marginal effects and prediction ratios were estimated and compared with simple OLS regressions to investigate the success of the public health scheme in making treatment widespread as an element of the strategy to achieve the MDGs for Thailand. Age, gender, marital status, income, career, residence, frequency and cost of treatment were employed to assess Thailand's progress in creating a truly egalitarian universal health care system. The testing of five hypotheses revealed that overall satisfaction with services and products was high. However, the socially disadvantaged low-income, less skilled, less educated, elderly, female-headed rural households targeted by universal health care did not have significantly higher levels of satisfaction with the public health system. On the contrary, those with higher education, business-oriented careers, higher spending on healthcare services, and living as couples were the most satisfied, suggesting an anti-egalitarian bias. Furthermore, increased frequency of treatments was negatively correlated with patient satisfaction with health care but positively correlated with satisfaction with health care products.

並列關鍵字

Millenium development goals ； Universal health care ； Ordered probit regression ； Thailand ； Efficiency ； Satisfaction evaluation