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Willingness to pay for improved public health care services in Saudi Arabia: a contingent valuation study among heads of Saudi households

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2018

Mohammed K. Al-Hanawi ,
Omar Alsharqi  and
Kirit Vaidya
Mohammed K. Al-Hanawi*
Affiliation:
Health Services and Hospitals Administration Department, Faculty of Economics and Administration, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Economics, Finance and Entrepreneurship Group, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Omar Alsharqi
Affiliation:
Health Services and Hospitals Administration Department, Faculty of Economics and Administration, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Kirit Vaidya
Affiliation:
Economics, Finance and Entrepreneurship Group, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK
*
*Correspondence to: Mohammed K. Al-Hanawi, Faculty of Economics and Administration, Health Services and Hospitals Administration, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, 21441, Saudi Arabia. Email: mkalhanawi@kau.edu.sa
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Abstract

The bulk of health care service provision in Saudi Arabia is undertaken by the public health care sector through the Ministry of Health, which is funded annually by the total government budget, which, in turn, is derived primarily from oil revenue. Public health care services in Saudi Arabia are characterised by an overload, overuse, and shortage of medical personnel, which can result in dissatisfaction with the quality of the current public health care services. This study uses a contingent valuation method to investigate the willingness of Saudi people to pay for improvements to the quality of public health care services. This study also determines the association between the willingness to pay for quality improvements and respondents’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. A pre-tested interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 1187 heads of household in Jeddah Province over a five-month period. Multi-stage sampling was employed to recruit participants. Partial Tobit regression and corresponding marginal effects analyses were used to analyse the data. These empirical analyses show that the majority of the sample was willing to pay for quality improvements in the public health care services. The results of this study might be of use to policymakers to help with both priority setting and fund allocation.

Keywords

healthcare financecontingent valuationpublic preferenceswillingness to payhealth insurance
Type
Articles
Information
Health Economics, Policy and Law , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 72 - 93
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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