Can insurance increase financial risk?

Access to care and medicines, burden of health care expenditures, and risk protection: Results from the World Health Survey

“…Without a broad medicines benefit, insurance coverage may not improve overall access to medicines. In fact, if insurance covers inpatient care and outpatient physician services but not the costs of the medicines prescribed during consultations, insurance coverage may lead to worse access to medicines and to higher financial burden because households need to pay for prescribed medicines out-of-pocket [14].…”

Inequities in Chinese Health Services

“…According to Wagstaff and Lindelow (2008), results from "three separate household surveys suggest that in China health insurance is more likely than not to increase out-of-pocket spending and to increase the risk of catastrophic and large expenses" (p. 1002). There are several possible reasons for this, including the increased likelihood of the insured to seek care, a preference by the insured to prefer more expensive providers, and likelihood of medical providers delivering more expensive medical tests, drugs, and interventions to the insured (Wagstaff, 2008). …”

Does the New Rural Cooperative Medical System with higher reimbursement rates reduce catastrophic health expenditures in rural China?

“…Moreover, much of the early literature found that the NRCMS increased the use of medical services and thereby actually increased total OOP payments for patients. [3,16,17] To summarize, there were considerable controversy concerning the threshold used to define catastrophic health care expenditures. While many studies that have assessed the impact of the NRCMS on catastrophic health care expenditures, most of those studies relied on early data or small-scale health surveys that were difficult to generalize.…”