Household Wellbeing and Health in Two Types of Welfare Regimes - A Comparison of (Lower-) Middle Income Households in Chile and Costa Rica

Abstract

Chile and Costa Rica’s health care systems fare well regarding health indicators. They vary corresponding to their welfare regimes: liberal-informal and social-democratic-informal. We compare how households in precarious prosperity, which are particularly dependent on institutional arrangements, deal with health. We ask: to what extent do health care systems, visible in household strategies, affect wellbeing; do health problems spill over to other life domains? Data consist of qualitative interviews with the same households in 2008, 2009 and 2013 in Chile and Costa Rica. In Chile households were worried about health and how to pay for it and other life domains were affected. In Costa Rica, the national health system limited the consequences of health problems into other life domains. The households’ experience of health systems offers fresh avenues for health policy-making.