Measurement and Explanation of Inequality in Health and Health Care in Low-Income Settings

This paper describes approaches to the measurement and explanation of income-related inequality and inequity in health care financing, health care utilization and health and considers the applicability and the feasibility of these methods in low-income countries. Results from a comparative study of 14 Asian countries are used to illustrate the main issues. The structure of health finance in low-income countries, in particular the heavy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, means that the equity issues in finance are quite different from those of concern in high-income countries. Primary concern is not with the distribution of contributions to pre-payment mechanisms but with the deterrent effect of payments on utilization and the distribution of uninsured payment risks. Measurement of inequity in utilization of health care in low-income countries is constrained by the lack of reliable measures of health that can be used to standardize for need. Nonetheless, sufficient is known of the distribution of need in many circumstances in order to make inferences about equity from inequality in health care use. The empirical analyses demonstrate that, in low-income countries, the better-off tend to pay more for health care, both absolutely and in relative terms. But they also consume more health care. Health care is financed is largely according to the benefit principle. Assessing the distributional performance of health systems in low-income settings therefore requires examination of finance and utilization simultaneously.health inequality, equity

Paying for health care : quantifying fairness, catastrophe, and impoverishment, with applications to Vietnam, 1993-98

The authors compare egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay) and minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments not exceed a prespecified share of prepayment income or not drive households into poverty). They develop indices for both sets of approaches. The authors compare the"agnostic"approach, which does not prespecify exactly how payments should be linked to ability to pay, with a recently proposed approach that requires payments to be proportional to ability to pay. They link the two approaches using results from the income redistribution literature on taxes and deductions, arguing that ability to pay can be thought of as prepayment income less deductions deemed necessary to ensure that a household reaches a minimum standard of living or food consumption. The authors show how both approaches can be enriched by distinguishing between vertical equity (or redistribution) and horizontal equity, and show how these can be quantified. They develop indices for"catastrophe"that capture the intensity of catastrophe as well as its incidence and also allow the analyst to capture the degree to which catastrophic payments occur disproportionately among poor households. Their measures of the poverty impact of health care payments also capture both intensity and incidence. To illustrate the arguments and methods, the authors use data on out-of-pocket health spending in Vietnam in 1993 and 1998-an interesting application, since 80 percent of health spending in that country was out-of-pocket in 1998. They find that out-of-pocket payments had a smaller disequalizing effect on income distribution in 1998 than 1993, whether income is measured as prepayment income or as ability to pay (that is, prepayment income less deductions, regardless of how deductions are defined). The underlying cause of the smaller disequalizing effect of out-of-pocket payments differs depending on whether the benchmark distribution is prepayment income or ability to pay. The authors find that the incidence and intensity of catastrophic payments-in terms of both prepayment income and ability to pay-declined between 1993 and 1998, and that both the incidence and the intensity of catastrophe became less concentrated among the poor. They also find that the incidence and intensity of the poverty impact of out-of-pocket payments diminished over the period. Finally, they find that the poverty impact of out-of-pocket payments is due primarily to poor people becoming even poorer rather than the nonpoor becoming poor and that in Vietnam in 1998 it was not expenses associated with inpatient care that increased poverty but nonhospital expenditures.Economic Theory&Research,Health Systems Development&Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Health Economics&Finance,Public Health Promotion,Health Economics&Finance,Health Systems Development&Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research

On decomposing the causes of health sector inequalities with an application to malnutrition inequalities in Vietnam

The authors propose a method for decomposing inequalities in the health sector into their causes, by coupling the concentration index with a regression framework. They also show how changes in inequality over time, and differences across countries, can be decomposed into the following: Changes due to changing inequalities in the determinants of the variable of interest. Changes in the means of the determinants. Changes in the effects of the determinants o the variable of interest. The authors illustrate the method using data on child malnutrition in Vietnam. They find that inequalities in height-for-age in 1993 and 1998 are accounted for largely by inequalities in household consumption and by unobserved influences at the commune level. And they find that an increase in such inequalities is accounted for largely by changes in these two influences. In the case of household consumption, rising inequalities play a part, but more important have been the inequality-increasing effects of rising average consumption and the increased protective effect of consumption on nutritional status. In the case of unobserved commune-level influences, rising inequality and general improvements seem to have been roughly equally important in accounting for rising inequality in malnutrition.Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Early Child and Children's Health,Disease Control&Prevention,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Inequality,Regional Rural Development,Environmental Economics&Policies,Early Child and Children's Health

“A built bed is a filled bed?” An empirical re-examination

This article provides an empirical re-examination of the relationship between regional hospital bed supply and the utilization of hospital care. It tests the hypothesis that the divergence of findings between studies based on micro-data (at the individual level) and those based on macro-data (at the regional level) is due to aggregation and specification bias. The main conclusion is that neither source of bias can account for the observed differences. Some other possible explanations are put forward. Regardless of the level of aggregation, a positive effect is found of bed supply on length of hospital stay but not on admission rates. This may be the result of major changes which have taken place in the financing of hospital services in the Netherlands during the last decade

Langer leren om langer te leven

Een van de meest opzienbarende en robuuste bevindingen in de sociale wetenschappen is de sterke samenhang tussen opleiding en gezondheid en sterfte. Deze relatie vloeit deels voort uit een causaal effect van opleiding op overleving

Inkomensbeleid in het ziektekostenstelsel

Tijdens de paarse kabinetten is de inkomenssolidariteit in het ziektekostenstelsel de facto toegenomen. In de nieuwe plannen worden de ziektekosten minder gebruikt als instrument in het inkomensbeleid

Equity in the finance of health care: Some international comparisons

This paper presents the results of a ten-country comparative study of health care financing systems and their progressivity characteristics. It distinguishes between the tax-financed systems of Denmark, Portugal and the U.K., the social insurance systems of France, the Netherlands and Spain, and the predominantly private systems of Switzerland and the U.S. It concludes that tax-financed systems tend to be proportional or mildly progressive, that social insurance systems are regressive and that private systems are even more regressive. Out-of-pocket payments are in most countries an especially regressive means of raising health care revenues

Improving maternal and child health in Pakistan: A programme evaluation using a difference in difference analysis

Introduction: Pakistan is a country with high maternal and infant mortality. Several large foreign funded projects were targeted at improving maternal, neonatal and child health. The Norway-Pakistan Partnership Initiative (NPPI) was one of these projects. This study aims to evaluate whether NPPI was successful in improving access and use of skilled maternal healthcare.Methods: We used data from three rounds (2009-2010, 2011-2012 and 2013-2014) of the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM). A difference-in-difference regression framework was used to estimate the effectiveness of NPPI and its different programme components with respect to maternal healthcare seeking behaviour of pregnant women. Various parts of the PSLM were combined to examine the healthcare seeking behaviour response of pregnant women to exposure to NPPI.Results: Trends in maternal care seeking behaviour of pregnant women were similar in districts exposed to NPPI and control districts. Consequently, only a weak and insignificant impact of NPPI on maternal care seeking behaviour was found. However, women in districts which used vouchers or which implemented contracting were more likely to seek skilled assistance with their delivery.Conclusion: We conclude that the objective to improve access to and use of skilled care was not achieved by NPPI. The small effects identified for vouchers and contracts on skilled birth attendance hold some promise for further experimentatio

Supplier-induced demand for physiotherapy in the Netherlands

Empirical studies of supplier-induced demand in health care have mostly concentrated on the analysis of physician behaviour. In this article, the focus is on the economic determinants of physiotherapist behaviour in The Netherlands. It is shown that relative prices work as strong incentives to alter the mix of services supplied, conform to the model of revenue maximization under a production constraint. However, the time-series analysis also gives some indication that this ability to influence the demand for their services to increase hourly income is not fully exploited. The latter finding is inconsistent with pure income maximization but rather points to a trade-off between loss of revenue and demand manipulation. The fact that the choice of therapy varies with the pressure on provider incomes does cast some doubt on the appropriateness of the chosen patterns of treatment in terms of effectiveness