Co-payments and equity in care: enhancing hospitalisation policy for Palestine refugees in Lebanon

This paper measures the impact of introducing a 10% co-payment on secondary care hospitalization costs for Palestine refugees living in Lebanon (PRL) in all UNRWA contracted hospitals, except for the Red Crescent Society. This ex-post analysis provides a detailed insight on the direction and magnitude of the policy impact in terms of demand by hospital type, average length of stay and treatment costs. With a complete population episode level dataset, we use multinomial logit, negative binomial, and linear models to estimate impacts on the different dependent variables, controlling for disease, patient and hospital characteristics. After the implementation patients were at least 4 pp (p