ArticleBioMed research international2021
How Different Motivations for Making Informal Out-Of-Pocket Payments Vary in Their Influence on Users' Satisfaction with Healthcare, Local and National Government, and Satisfaction with Life?
Article in BioMed research international, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Reform That Was Never Completed: Why Greece Must Redesign Its Health Financing Architecture.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Historical origins of corruption in the Romanian public health system - path dependency and contagion effect.Health economics review · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe dominant view in the literature is that informal payments in healthcare universally are a negative phenomenon. By contrast, we theorize that the motivation healthcare users for making informal payments (IP) can be classified into three categories: (1) a cultural norm, (2) "grease the wheels" payments if users offered to pay to get better services, and (3) "sand the wheels" payments if users were asked to pay by healthcare personnel or felt that payments were expected. We further hypothesize that these three categories of payments are differently associated with a user's outcomes, namely, satisfaction with healthcare, local and national government, satisfaction with life, and satisfaction with life of children in the future.
methodsWe used microdata from the 2016 Life-in-Transition survey. Multivariate regression analysis is used to quantify relationships between these categories of payments and users' outcomes.
resultsPayments that are the result of cultural norms are associated with better outcomes. On the contrary, "sand the wheel" payments are associated with worse outcomes. We find no association between making "grease the wheels" payments and outcomes.
conclusionsThis is the first paper which evaluates association between three different categories of informal payments with a wide range of users' outcomes on a diverse sample of countries. Focusing on informal payments in general, rather than explicitly examining specific motivations, obscures the true outcomes of making IP. It is important to distinguish between three different motivations for informal payment, namely, cultural norms, "grease the wheels," and "sand the wheels" since they have varying associations with user outcomes. From a policy making standpoint, variation in the links between different motivations for making IP and measures of satisfaction suggest that decision-makers should put their primary focus on situations where IP are explicitly asked for or are implied by the situation and that they should differentiate this from cases of gratitude payments. If such measures are not implemented, then policy makers may unintentionally ban the behaviour that is linked with increased satisfaction with healthcare, government, and life (i.e., paying gratitude).
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