EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Measurement of horizontal inequity in health care utilisation using European panel data

Teresa Bago d'Uva, Andrew Jones and Eddy Van Doorslaer

Journal of Health Economics, 2009, vol. 28, issue 2, 280-289

Abstract: Measurement of inequity in health care delivery has focused on the extent to which health care utilisation is or is not distributed according to need, irrespective of income. Studies using cross-sectional data have proposed various ways of measuring and standardizing for need, but inevitably much of the inter-individual variation in needs remains unobserved in cross-sections. This paper exploits panel data methods to improve the measurement by including the time-invariant part of unobserved heterogeneity into the need-standardization procedure. Using latent class hurdle models for GP and specialist visits estimated on 8 annual waves of the European Community Household Panel we compute indices of horizontal equity that partition total income-related variation in use into a need- and a non-need related part, not only for the observed but also for the unobserved but time-invariant component. We also propose and compare a more conservative index of horizontal inequity to the conventional statistic. We find that many of the cross-country comparative results appear fairly robust to the panel data test, although the panel-based methods lead to significantly higher estimates of horizontal inequity for most countries. This confirms that better estimation and control for need often reveals more pro-rich distributions of doctor utilisation.

Keywords: Inequality; Inequity; Health; care; utilisation; Panel; data; ECHP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (64)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167-6296(08)00132-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Measurement of Horizontal Inequity in Health Care Utilisation using European Panel Data (2007) Downloads
Working Paper: Measurement of horizontal inequity in health care utilisation using European Panel data (2007) Downloads
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:eee:jhecon:v:28:y:2009:i:2:p:280-289

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire

More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:28:y:2009:i:2:p:280-289