International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health | September 2019 | Vol 6 | Issue 9 Page 4071 International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health Shet N et al. Int J Community Med Public Health. 2019 Sep;6(9):4071-4076 http://www.ijcmph.com pISSN 2394-6032 | eISSN 2394-6040 Original Research Article Awareness and attitude regarding health insurance among insured and non-insured: a cross sectional study Nagaraj Shet 1 , Ghulam Jeelani Qadiri 1 , Sunita Saldanha 1 , Gayathri Kanalli 2 , Prajna Sharma 3 * INTRODUCTION Socio-economic development and health of community cannot be achieved in isolation as they are related with each other. 1 Despite large improvements in recent years, life expectancy in India still remains below than other countries following a similar pattern of development. 2 Only 1% of the gross domestic product (GDP) is being spent for financing health care by the government. 3 Curative services have always favored the non-poor. It is seen that for every Rs. 1 spent on the poorest 20% population, Rs. 3 is spent on the richest quintile. Hospitalization have forced people to borrow heavily or sell assets to cover expenses in 40% of them and have pushed almost 25% of them to below poverty line in because of its expenses. 4 However, unfortunately, the ABSTRACT Background: Health insurance is an important mechanism in the modern world to save the individuals from the huge health shock, even then very high percentage of people even from educated higher income groups are not covered under any health insurance policy. This study was undertaken to know the knowledge, attitude and practice regarding health insurance. Methods: A community based cross sectional study was conducted among 550 household of Uttar Kannada and Udupi districts. Multistage sampling technique was used. Results: Of the 550 study participants, 384 (69.8%) were BPL card holders. 348 (63.27%) were aware and also subscribed for any type of the health insurance, 115 (20.91%) were aware but did not subscribe while 87 (15.82%) were not aware about it. The main source of information were health workers 185 (39.74%), friends and family 178 (38.44%) and media 99 (21.38%). Of the 348 who had health insurance, only 89 (25.57%) utilized them. Reasons for not availing health insurances other than being unaware were complicated process 85 (42.08%) and provides only partial coverage 49 (24.26%). The main reasons for not using the health insurance were non availability of empanelled hospital 84 (74.34%), disease not being under the scope of scheme 60 (23.17%) and 32 (12.36%) were unaware about the process of availing. Conclusions: Health insurances are the best way to help people reduce their financial burden. Hence it is very important to educate the community regarding the best health insurance available so that they can take the maximum benefits from it. Keywords: Awareness, Health insurance, Attitude, Udupi, Uttar Kannada 1 Department of Hospital Administration, Yenepoya Medical College Hospital, 2 MBBS, 3 Department of Community Medicine, Kanachur College of Medical Sciences, Deralakatte, Mangalore, India Received: 11 June 2019 Revised: 01 August 2019 Accepted: 02 August 2019 *Correspondence: Dr. Prajna Sharma, E-mail: dr.prajna88@gmail.com Copyright: © the author(s), publisher and licensee Medip Academy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18203/2394-6040.ijcmph20194019