Meliyanni Johar

National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction · Social Health Insurance Working Group

Economically disadvantaged families often cannot pay for healthcare. Since Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional (JKN) was launched in 2014, the government expands subsidies for these families, identified based on consumption. However, this criterion would misclassify families with low purchasing power as economically advantaged because they have large consum...

The condition of public health in disadvantaged areas has become a public highlight lately such as the high prevalence of child malnutrition and infectious diseases. This can be related to the lack of utilization of health services and the health behavior of the community itself. This study aims to provide a more comprehensive picture of clean and...

Susenas telah menjadi dasar berbagai riset dan kebijakan di Indonesia sejak pertama kali dilaksanakan tahun 1963. Namun, ada fitur-fitur yang belum dipahami benar oleh para penggunanya. Artikel ini mengangkat dua fitur yang dapat menghasilkan inferensi kurang tepat. Yang pertama, variabel pengeluaran tidaklah mengukur pengeluaran pribadi, melainkan...

Set data Susenas telah mendasari banyak riset ilmiah dan kebijakan di negara kita dari tahun 1960an. Akan tetapi ada fitur-fitur Susenas yang belum dipahami benar oleh para penggunanya. Artikel ini mengangkat dua fitur yang dapat menghasilkan inferensi yang tidak akurat, bahkan tidak mendasar. Yang pertama adalah variabel pengeluaran di Susenas tid...

Background: Progress towards health-for-all must be supported by quality health facilities that are available to everyone. However, health care facilities in remote and underdeveloped areas, borderland, and outlying islands or Daerah Terpencil, Tertinggal, Perbatasan dan Kepulauan (DTPK) are facing some constraints to have access to health coverage...

What if a popular data set that has generated a long stream of literature has been misunderstood and has led to misleading inferences? This paper uses the case of household expenditure in the Indonesian National Socio-Economic Survey data (SUSENAS), which started over 50 years ago. Appropriate use of SUSENAS for policy analysis requires an understa...

There is a potential free-rider problem when several siblings consider future provision of care for their elderly parents. Siblings can commit to not providing long-term support by living far away. If location decisions are made by birth order, older siblings may enjoy a first-mover advantage. We study siblings' location decisions relative to their...

This paper shows how the cost of out-of-hospital medical services and prescription drugs change as Australians enter and live through retirement. We use a sample of over 65,000 retired individuals aged forty-five and over, and extract their Medicare claims for period 2005–2014. Analysing the expenditure distribution for up to eight years after reti...

The westernization of Asian countries has led to the rapid expansion of Western-style fast-food restaurants, which are believed to be fueling an unprecedented rise in body mass in these countries. This study tests this belief using longitudinal data from China. Exploiting the opening of a Western-style fast-food restaurant in a particular community...

While there is an extensive body of literature on the demand for hospital services, little is known about the interaction between public and private hospitals in a mixed system. In this article, we (1) apply latent class analysis to identify distinct subgroups of patients who use the hospital market differently, (2) characterize each patient type b...

We study perverse incentives in health care using the case of waiting lists for non-emergency procedures. “Not ready for care” (NRFC) status removes patients indefinitely from the lists, and may be misused to improve performance reports. We test whether NRFC rate increases with rewards for good performance. The hospital database is also uniquely li...

Micro panels characterized by large numbers of individuals observed over a short time period provide a rich source of information, but as yet there is only limited experience in using such data for forecasting. Existing simulation evidence supports the use of a fixed-effects approach when forecasting but it is not based on a truly micro panel set-u...

This study shows that, in an unregulated fee-setting environment, specialist physicians practise price discrimination on the basis of their patients' income status. Our results are consistent with profit maximisation behaviour by specialists. These findings are based on a large population survey that is linked to administrative medical claims recor...

Despite concerns about reporting biases and interpretation, self-assessed health (SAH) remains the measure of health most used by researchers, in part reflecting its ease of collection and in part the observed correlation between SAH and objective measures of health. Using a unique Australian data set, which consists of survey data linked to admini...

It is well recognized that a depressive mental state can persist for a long time, and this can adversely impact labour market outcomes. The aim of this article is to examine the direct association between depression status in late-teenage years and adult wages, as well as the indirect association, operating through accumulated education, experience...

We examine patient socioeconomic status, the strength of the patient–doctor relationship and local area competition as determinants of the quality and price of GP services. We exploit a large-sample patient data set in Australia and its linkage to administrative databases. The sample contains over 260 000 patients and over 12 600 GPs, observed betw...

SUMMARY It is generally believed that intergenerational coresidence by elderly parents and adult children provides old-age security for parents. Although such coresidence is still the most common living arrangement in many countries, empirical evidence of its benefits to parental health is scarce. Using Indonesian data and a program evaluation tech...

Children play a key role in supporting elderly parents, and the literature has consistently found reciprocity whereby parents compensate their children for providing care and attention. To understand how the mode of compensation is related to the characteristics of parents and children, we studied the determinants of transitions to parent-child cor...

Evidence supporting the effects of mergers in healthcare markets on quality is mixed. In this study we exploit a government policy in NSW that imposed mergers on area health services (AHSs) to evaluate the effects of the merger on patient waiting times, an indicator of quality. We focus on the specific question of whether the merger had a larger im...

When waiting lists are used to ration treatments for nonemergency procedures, a prioritization rule is required to ensure that urgent patients are admitted first. This study investigates how the introduction of an explicit prioritization guideline affected the prioritization behavior of doctors, who previously had full discretion for assigning pati...

Explaining individual, regional, and provider variation in health care spending is of enormous value to policymakers but is often hampered by the lack of individual level detail in universal public health systems because budgeted spending is often not attributable to specific individuals. Even rarer is self-reported survey information that helps ex...

This study examines information on an array of health limitations, chronic conditions, treatments, and drug consumptions to reveal the prevalence and severity of unhealthiness that are not directly observed. Cluster analysis is applied to 265,468 individuals who participated in the 45 and Up Study in Australia. Among the study participants, 8% of t...

An average patient waits between 2 and 3 months for an elective procedure in Australian public hospitals. Approximately 60% of all admissions occur through an emergency department, and bed competition from emergency admission provides one path by which waiting times for elective procedures may be lengthened. In this article, we investigated the ext...

When siblings are concerned for the well-being of their elderly parents, the costs of caregiving and long-term commitment create a free-rider problem. If siblings living near their parents can share the costs, this positive externality exacerbates the under-provision of proximate living. Location decisions allow siblings to make a commitment to not...

In Australia, lowering waiting times for elective surgery has been a policy focus over the last two decades. Initially, the focus at the national level was on subsidising private health insurance with the aim of shifting demand from public to private hospitals. More recently, policies have shifted to directly expanding public hospital capacity and...

This article provides a comprehensive profile of individual healthcare expenditure using the 45 and Up Study of over 267,000 NSW residents linked to administrative medical service records. Individuals aged 45 and over consume two‐thirds of healthcare expenditure in Australia. We compute annual total healthcare expenditure comprising hospital admiss...

When doctors are unconstrained in setting fees, they charge higher fees to high income patients. For a standard GP consultation, the average fee gap is 25% of a minimum price. Competition closes this gap, but not local area income.

One of the core goals of a universal health care system is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of socioeconomic status. We test for discrimination using patient waiting times for non-emergency treatment in public hospitals. Waiting time should reflect patients' clinical need with priority given to more urgent cases. Using data from Australia,...

In a market where insurers are not allowed to risk rate, we find evidence of advantageous selection using observed health expenditure risk. Selection is driven by income and optimism about the future. This may explain insurers’ profitability, despite community rating.

Access to elective surgery in Australian public hospitals is rationed using waiting lists. In this paper we undertake a DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux reweighting approach to attribute variation in waiting time to clinical need or to discrimination. Using data from NSW public patients in 2004-2005, we find the discrimination effect dominates clinical need...

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we explore the relationship between body mass and wages. We use quantile regression to provide a broad description of the relationship across the wage distribution. We also allow the relationship to vary by the degree of social skills involved in different jobs. Our results find that for female...

When siblings wish for the well-being of their elderly parents, the cost of caregiving and long-term commitment creates a free-rider problem among siblings. We estimate a sequential game to investigate externality and strategic interaction among adult siblings regarding their location choice relative to their elderly parents. Using the US Health an...

Australia was one of the first countries to introduce a publicly funded Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine program, and its introduction coincided with a media campaign to promote regular cervical screening. One issue with HPV vaccination is how it impacts on demand for screening. This study examines changes in women's screening preferences follow...

Informal filial care plays an important role for elderly parents facing health challenges. Ageing, however, exacerbates the burden of filial care because the ratio of older to younger individuals is higher and disabled parents live longer. The well-being of elderly parents is even more insecure in Asian developing countries that are undergoing unpr...

More than 45% of Australians buy health insurance for private treatment in hospital. This is despite having access to universal and free public hospital treatment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that avoidance of long waits for public treatment is one possible explanation for the high rate of insurance coverage. In this study, we investigate the effec...

It is generally believed that intergenerational coresidence by elderly parents and adult children provides security for parents in their old age. In many countries, such intergenerational coresidence is the most common living arrangement. Using a nationally-representative dataset and a program evaluation technique that accounts for endogenous and h...

The Productivity Commission (2008) identified waiting times for elective surgery as a measure of governments' success in providing accessible health care. At the 2007 COAG meeting, the Prime Minister identified reduction of elective surgery waiting times in public hospitals as a major policy priority. To date, the analysis of waiting time data has...

In tax-financed health care systems, where the price of health care is essentially zero, explicit waiting lists are the most common means of rationing demand. Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada and Scandinavian countries use waiting lists to allocate non-emergency health treatments at public hospitals. Australians have access to universal and f...

The supply-side responsiveness to public programs targeted to consumers is not widely studied. However, it is unlikely that supply variables remain constant, particularly when their link to the demand initiative is weak. The aim of this study is to provide such analysis, using the experience of the Indonesian health card program, which is a demand-...

In this paper, we use the nationally representative Indonesian Family Life Survey dataset (IFLS-3), to examine if access to loans from informal networks such as family and friends influences borrowing behavior in formal credit markets. Our empirical results show that there is a gender dimension to borrowing behavior, with females being more likely...

This study investigated the hypothesis that socioeconomic differences in health status change can largely be explained by the higher prevalence of individual health-risk behaviors among those of lower socioeconomic position. Data were from the Americans' Changing Lives study, a longitudinal survey of 3617 adults representative of the US non-institu...

In the Australian public health system, access to elective surgery is rationed through provision of health care services, it is generally assumed that a patientÂ’s waiting time and locations. In this paper we undertake Oaxaca-Blinder and DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux decompostition analyses to attribute variation in waiting time to a component explaine by...

Besley, Hall, and Preston (1999) estimated a model of the demand for private health insurance in Britain as a function of regional waiting lists and found that increases in the number of people waiting for more than 12 months (the long-term waiting list) increased the probability of insurance purchase. In the absence of waiting time data, the lengt...

The strategic bequest motive implies that children may want to live with their parents and provide care for them with the expectation of inheriting a larger portion of their bequest. This paper examines this hypothesis by focusing on the transition to coresidence by elderly Japanese parents and their children using underutilized Japanese panel data...

This paper investigates the determinants of married women's autonomy in Indonesia using the 2000 Indonesian Family Life Survey 3 (IFLS3). It considers the role of kinship norms and the effect of labor force participation on married women's autonomy. The measure of autonomy is based on self-reported answers to an array of questions relating to decis...

In this paper, we use the nationally representative Indonesian Family Life Survey dataset (IFLS-3), to examine if access to loans from informal networks such as family and friends influences borrowing behavior in formal credit markets. Our empirical results show that there is a gender dimension to borrowing behavior, with females being more likely...

Despite the success internationally of cervical screening programs debate continues about optimal program design. This includes increasing participation rates among under-screened women, reducing unnecessary early re-screening, improving accuracy of and confidence in screening tests, and determining the cost-effectiveness of program parameters, suc...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of a pro-poor nation-wide health card program, which provides free basic health care at public health facilities in Indonesia. To quantify the effect of the program, it departs from the traditional regression-based approach in the literature. It employs propensity score matching to reduce the selection bias du...

The poverty alleviating benefits of gender-targeted microcredit programs has successfully been demonstrated in South Asia. In this paper, we examine the demand for credit by Indonesian women, in the absence of such a targeted microcredit program. We argue that when credit markets are imperfect and there are informational asymmetries, it is importan...