Awareness and Willingness to Pay for Health Insurance: an Empirical Study with Reference to Punjab India

The Special Issue on Behavioral and Social Science

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Awareness and Willingness to Pay for Health Insurance: An Empirical Study with Reference to Punjab India
Dr. Sumninder Kaur Bawa Sr. Lecturer Department of Commerce and Business Management Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab. India Email: [e-mail], Phone: [phone] Miss Ruchita (Corresponding author) Senior Research Fellow Department of Commerce and Business Management Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, Punjab. India Email: [e-mail], Phone: [phone] Abstract
The present study is an effort in the area of health insurance and the peculiar feature of it lies in multidimensions. As firstly, it examines the respondents who are aware or not aware about health insurance as well as various sources of awareness; secondly, those who are aware have subscribed it or not; thirdly, those who have not subscribed what are the reasons behind the same; and last but not least are they willing to join and pay for it? The study was conducted in Punjab and 600 questionnaires were got filled from randomly selected general public, out of which 563 found to be suitable for analysis. The results shown low level of awareness and willingness to join and seven key factors are barrier in subscription of health insurance. Moreover significant association exist between the gender; age; education; occupation; income of respondents with their willingness to pay for health insurance.

Keywords: Awareness, willingness, Association, health insurance and barriers. 1. Introduction
Socio-Economic development and health of community are related with each other in such a way that it is impossible to achieve one without other i.e. one cannot be achieved in isolation. No doubt, the economic development in India is gaining momentum over the last few decades because of the government initiatives in public health care facilities, yet its

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