Effects of social protection on health

Abstract

Strengthening linkages between health and social protection systems may be particularly important to address emerging health priorities, in particular, in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the social protection and health literature many studies underscore the significant limitations of current knowledge on the effects of social protection on health outcomes. This chapter tries to close this knowledge gap, by identifying potential ways of how social protection schemes can impact health outcomes and summarizing empirical evidence that focus on the causal effects of social protection on health outcomes. The evidence shows that social protection coverage improve health outcomes. Across the different social protection schemes, it seems that health outcomes are mainly affected by the income/financial protection effect of social protection and less by an increase of health care utilization. Main reason for this finding is the limited quality of health care and lack of health system capacities in many low and middle income countries.