Health Care"
BY: KENNETH L. LEONARD
Columbia University
Department of Economics
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=229475
Paper ID: Columbia University Working Paper No. 9900-02
Date: May 2000
Contact: KENNETH L. LEONARD
Email: Mailto:KL206 at columbia.edu
Postal: Columbia University
Department of Economics
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ABSTRACT:
Traditional healers are a source of health care for which
Africans have always paid and even with the expansion of modern
medicine healers are still popular. This paper advances the
unique view that traditional healers neither possess
supernatural power nor do they take advantage of their clients:
they use important elements of their practice to credibly
deliver unobservable medical effort and therefore high quality
care. An important element of their practice has previously been
ignored: traditional healers use outcome-contingent contracts to
deliver unobservable medical effort. This paper presents
empirical evidence that, as a result of these contracts,
traditional healers are popular because they provide more
unobservable medical effort than other providers from which
patients can choose.