Horizontal Inequity in Health Care Utilization in Japan,

International comparisons of horizontal inequity in health have recently become one of the most pertinent issues in health economics. Japan has not been included in these international comparisons. This omission is rectified in this paper, which focuses on Japan. Moreover, we consider its dynamics over six years from 1992 to 1998. The dynamics has never considered in this fields. In a rigorous international comparison, we cannot find any horizontal inequity in health in Japan and almost similar to Belgium.

International Comparison of Subjective Health Evaluation - USA, UK and Japan -,

This paper tries to calculate quality of life (QOL) from subjective health evaluations in Japan following Cutler and Richardson (1997) and Groot (2000). It then extends the model in several ways. Firstly, while previous studies define the domain of OL in an ad hoc manner, i.e. excluding "excellent" or "very poor" respondents, this paper suggests a more rigorous alternative measure. Secondly, heterogeneity among individuals that is inevitable in micro-data is accounted for in the estimation process. Thirdly, economic variables such as income or job status that are considered to affect subjective health status are also accounted for. The estimation results show the following: using the same model as previous work, similar tendencies are found, but coefficients are smaller for many symptoms and diseases. Economic variables help to clarify the effect of symptoms or diseases on subjective health evaluation. The QOL measures defined in this paper are smaller for most symptoms and diseases, and thus the measures in previous research are likely to overestimate of damage to QOL by symtoms and diseases and may be inappropriate.

Updated Horizontal Inequity in Health Care Utilization in Japan: Comparisons with OECD Countries Using an Original Survey

We compare health care inequity in Japan with that in other OECD countries in 2002 and 2003. To overcome Japanese data problems, we conducted an original survey. Although some problems remain, we obtained internationally comparable results on health care inequity for Japan. We test the utilization measure by the number of outpatients, the number of days of inpatient utilization in the previous year, out-of-pocket payments in the previous year and other measures, such as a yes/no indicator for outpatient or inpatient utilization in a lifetime. The results show that there is no inequity in outpatient or inpatient utilization, but out-ofpocket payments show significant pro-rich inequity.