An Analytical Model of Demand for Hospital Inpatient Care

Pius Eze ()

International Journal of Social Sciences Perspectives, 2018, vol. 2, issue 1, 80-86

Abstract: This paper presents an analytical model of demand for curative care such as hospital inpatient care. In this essay, a person's illness is used as a measure of the person's health status. Medical care and non-medical consumption are the choice variables in a consumer’s constrained utility-maximization problem. Methodologically, this model of demand for medical care does not rely on capital theory, common in the literature. All else equal, a person's demand for hospital inpatient care depends on how ill the person is. That is, the demand is a function of the severity of the person's illness. The model is static and deterministic, and is based on the fact that, by definition, only sick persons demand curative medical care. One implication of distinguishing curative care from other types of care is the possibility of satiation when the person is healthy. Satiation diminishes differences in medical care expenditures between wealthy and poor persons and can help explain the empirically observed low income elasticity of demand for hospital inpatient care.

Keywords: Inpatient care; Utility-maximization; Hospital; Curative care; Consumer models; Human capital. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://onlineacademicpress.com/index.php/IJSSP/article/view/53/51 (application/pdf)
https://onlineacademicpress.com/index.php/IJSSP/article/view/53/488 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oap:ijossp:v:2:y:2018:i:1:p:80-86:id:53

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Social Sciences Perspectives from Online Academic Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heather Rothman ().