Socioeconomic position and health services use in Germany and Spain during the Great Recession

Lourdes Lostao, Siegfried Geyer, Romana Albaladejo, Almudena Moreno-Lostao, Juana M Santos and Enrique Regidor

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 8, 1-12

Abstract: Objective: The relationship of socioeconomic position with the use of health services may have changed with the emergence of the economic crisis. This study shows that relationship before and during the economic crisis, in Germany and in Spain. Methods: Data from the 2006 and 2011 Socio-Economic Panel carried out in Germany, and from the 2006 and 2011 National Health Surveys carried out in Spain were used. The health services investigated were physician consultations and hospitalization. The measures of socioeconomic position used were education and household income. The magnitude of the relationship between socioeconomic position and the use of each health services was estimated by calculating the percentage ratio by binary regression. Results: In Germany, in both periods, after adjusting for age, sex, type of health insurance and need for care, subjects belonging to the lower educational categories had a lower frequency of physician consultations, while those belonging to the lower income categories had a higher frequency of hospitalization. In the model comparing the two lower socioeconomic categories to the two higher categories, the percentage ratio for physician consultation by education was 0.97 (95%CI 0.96–0.98) in 2006 and 0.96 (95%CI 0.95–0.97) in 2011, and the percentage ratio for hospitalization by income was 1.14 (95%CI 1.05–1.25) in 2006 and 1.12 (95%CI 1.03–1.21) in 2011. In Spain, no significant socioeconomic differences were observed in either period in the frequency of use of these health services in the fully adjusted model. Conclusion: The results suggest that the economic crisis did not alter accessibility to the health system in either country, given that the socioeconomic pattern in the use of these health services was similar before and during the crisis in both countries.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0183325 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 83325&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0183325

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0183325

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).