Conference Paper
Health Insurance and Financial Protection: Evidence from Egypt
No.
ERF32AC_134
Publisher
ERF
Date
May, 2026
Topic
I3. Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
The paper exploits a natural experiment, through the phased roll-out of Egypt’s Universal Health Insurance (UHI), to assess the impact of UHI on out-of-pocket (OOP) health spending and catastrophic health spending. Using synthetic control methodology, findings indicate that the introduction of UHI led to a statistically significant decline in household per-capita OOP health spending by about 6 percent and on the incidence of catastrophic health spending by almost 37 percent. Heterogeneous analysis indicates that a statistically significant effect is only observed for out-of-pocket health spending for the early-treated governorate.
Authors
Hoda El Enbaby
Independent Researcher and PhD student, Health Economics...