Abstract

Health, Poverty, and Well-Being: A Case of Tanzania
The paper focuses on the aspect of health and poverty in Tanzania. The majority of the low-income people in the country are not able to afford routine medical check-ups nor undergo all stages of treatment, such people opt for other alternative types of treatment that they can afford. Medical services are mainly dictated by the ability to pay and the magnitude of poverty varies depending on the geographical location of a person.

Although, the issue of health is nowadays given much attention in recent literature, still needs `intense research. In this paper, we use cross-sectional data from the National Panel Survey (NPS) collected by the National Bureau of Statistics to track what type of treatment the households spend on health services.
The NPS questionnaire collected information from all members of the household and those aged 12 years and above were personally interviewed at the time of the survey. Variables such as locality, main activity, gender, and age of respondents were also obtained to provide a snapshot of the well-being at the household level. Health is informative about living standards and can facilitate the reclassification of poor and non-poor households, and better measurements of health statistics provide a significant indicator of poverty.
Keywords: Health spending patterns Poverty and Wellbeing