Abstract:
South Africa waived user fees for primary healthcare in 1994 and,
again, in 1996. The first waiver focused on young children, elderly adults,
pregnant women and nursing mothers, while the 1996 reform waived fees for
the remainder of the population, subject to means tests. We take advantage of
household survey information to examine the impact of the policy on a subset of
the reform-eligible population. Although it was expected that public healthcare
facility usage would have increased post-reform, no statistically significant
evidence supported such a claim. Therefore, our results are consistent with some
very recent research examining the 1994 reform, but are generally at odds with
the general impression in the literature that user fee abolition matters, when it
comes to alleviating inequities in access to healthcare.
