Financial Literacy and Utilization of Government and Private Health Care Services for Ever ANC Visits: An Indian Women Scenario from NFHS-3

Financial literacy is the ability to understand finance, where one has the awareness, knowledge and skills to make decisions about savings, investments, borrowings and expenditure in an informed manner. Thus, this present paper, the financial literates refer to those women who have a bank saving account, have knowledge on loan programs in a bank, and have any knowledge of health insurance. It has hypothesized that those financially literates are more likely to utilize various health care services than the non-financial literates especially maternal health. Therefore fore, an attempt has been made to study the financial literacy and their utilization for govt. or private health care services for ANC. Uni-variate, bi-variate analysis and multivariate analysis were done for the study. The Northern region women belonging to the Muslim religion community who are residing in urban areas are more likely to be financially illiterate than those of women from the Southern region from belonging to the Hindus, Christians and other religious group who are residing in an urban areas. Financially literates were more likely to visit any healthcare services than the financially illiterates. Financial illiterates were more likely to utilize government health care while the financial literates tend to use the private health care systems.