Charles Kenny points to research showing that, while having health insurance doesn’t always lead to better health outcomes, it does seem to make people happier:
The study suggested, unsurprisingly, that in places where out-of-pocket expenditures constitute a large portion of total health cost—compared to insurance and government financing—more households are burdened by high medical bills. In Brazil and Vietnam, out-of-pocket expenditures account for the considerable majority of total health spending, compared to about one-fifth of spending in the U.S. and less than 10 percent in the U.K. or Germany.
So perhaps it isn’t a surprise that expanding access to health insurance leads to fewer “catastrophic” expenditures—and greater happiness. In Thailand in the year 2000, 31 percent of households in which a member had required inpatient care faced health bills of more than 10 percent of the household’s total yearly consumption. The passage of a universal health insurance policy in 2001 reduced that proportion by half, to 15 percent. And Patrick Asuming at Columbia University, who studied (PDF) a health insurance scheme in Ghana that covered hospital and clinic visits alongside approved medications, found that offering a random group of recipients subsidies for insurance led to more people getting insurance, better self-reported health (including fewer days feeling ill), and greater levels of contentment. Having such insurance increased the chance that recipients reported themselves happy or very happy by 22 percent.
The Dish 