DP18680 Health Insurance and Height Inequality: Evidence from European Health Insurance Expansions
Health insurance expansions can improve health outcomes through greater access to healthcare. This is truer among the poorer segments of the population, which otherwise could not afford healthcare costs, or might lack the information about where to seek proper health cures and interventions. In this paper we examine whether expanded access to health insurance historically reduced height inequality by promoting body growth, especially across the poorer individuals, and so improved their height, a widely used and well-established anthropometric measure of health and well-being. We draw our evidence using a panel of countries for which we could measure height inequality; our evidence suggests that indeed within-country height inequality declined after insurance expansions towards near-universal coverage.
