The Impact of Health Card Program on Access to Reproductive Health Services: An Indonesian Experience

Health card program aims to protect the poor in Indonesia during the Asian economic crisis. Health cards were targeted and allocated exclusively to the poor that would provide free access to public health services. The impact of health card program to reproductive health services was rarely discussed by previous studies that pay more attention on health card utilization for both inpatient and outpatient. Using Indonesian family life survey (IFLS) data 1997-2000 from RAND Corporation, this study aims to evaluate the impact of health card program during Asian economic crisis on access to reproductive health services and answer the question whether who had health card really have better access to reproductive health services. Discussion in this paper limit on antenatal care, place of delivery and contraceptive use which are only reproductive health components that covered by health card program. Using combination between descriptive analysis and multivariate analysis, this study found that the health cards were not well targeted and distributed. The study also found that, generally, there is no significant effect of health card ownership to access to reproductive health services.