In this seminar organized by the Global Health and Economic Development Academic Team, PhD student Lisa Hall asks whether covariate health risk influence stated support for risk pooling.
- PhD student
- Date
- Thursday 3 Sep 2026, 13:00 - 14:00
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- 4.39
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
By combining World Health Survey data (2002–04) from nine sub-Saharan African countries with district-level estimates of HIV incidence, she finds that support for healthy people contributing towards the health care of the sick follows an inverted U in local HIV
burden: support rises across the lower range, reaches an interior maximum, and then declines.
She further finds that exposure to idiosyncratic personal health shocks, by contrast, is positively and monotonically associated with support. Covariate and idiosyncratic health risk are therefore associated with pooling preferences in opposite directions at high exposure.
The pattern suggests that stated preferences track the structure of the risk itself: support for risk pooling increases with low level burden and erodes exactly where risk becomes hardest to pool. Widespread shocks may therefore raise the need for risk pooling while
weakening expressed support for it – a tension which bears directly on health-insurance expansion in high-burden settings.
