Deciphering the complex intermediate role of health coverage through insurance in the context of well-being by network analysis

TL;DR

This study uses network analysis to explore how health insurance acts as an intermediate factor in well-being, revealing its strong link to income and highlighting disparities and potential improvements in coverage types.

Contribution

It introduces a novel network-based approach to understand the complex role of health insurance in well-being, emphasizing its dependence on income and social resource interdependencies.

Findings

Health insurance's role is strongly linked to income.

Disparities in health coverage distribution are evident.

Certain types of coverage may be more efficient.

Abstract

Recent initiatives that overstate health insurance coverage for well-being conflict with the recognized antagonistic facts identified by the determinants of health that identify health care as an intermediate factor. By using a network of controlled interdependences among multiple social resources including health insurance, which we reconstructed from survey data of the U.S. and Bayesian networks structure learning algorithms, we examined why health insurance through coverage, which in most countries is the access gate to health care, is just an intermediate factor of well-being. We used social network analysis methods to explore the complex relationships involved at general, specific and particular levels of the model. All levels provide evidence that the intermediate role of health insurance relies in a strong relationship to income and reproduces its unfair distribution. Some signals about the most efficient type of health coverage emerged in our analyses.