Active Patients in Rural African Health Care: Implications for Welfare, Policy and Privatization
Author(s)
Leonard, Kenneth
Abstract
The active patient is introduced and contrasted to the passive patient and rational patient in health seeking models of rural developing economies. The active patient model explicitly addresses the variance in the role of quality caused by the different illness conditions that patients can suffer from, the endogeneity of the budget constraint to the health seeking decision, asymmetric information in the supply of critical health inputs, and the incomplete health markets present in developing countries. The paper demonstrates the validity of the active patient perspective by reference to the contracts available at traditional healers and evidence of the rationality of choices made by patients when choosing providers with varying levels of quality. The model has important implications for research methodology and policy.
