Measuring Access and Inequality of Access to Health Care: a Policy-oriented Decomposition

Antonio Abatemarco, Massimo Aria (), Sergio Beraldo and Michela Collaro ()
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Massimo Aria: University of Naples "Federico II", Postal: Department of Economics and Statistics, Complesso Universitario di Monte Sant'Angelo, Via Cintia, 21 80126, Napoli, ITALY
Michela Collaro: University of Naples "Federico II", Postal: Department of Economics and Statistics, Complesso Universitario di Monte Sant'Angelo, Via Cintia, 21 80126, Napoli, ITALY

No 164, CELPE Discussion Papers from CELPE - CEnter for Labor and Political Economics, University of Salerno, Italy

Abstract: Budget cuts and increasing out-of-pocket expenses have seriously jeopardized access to adequate health care, even where a mandate to provide universal health coverage is well established. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric estimation strategy for the measurement of equality of opportunity in health care within an ex-ante perspective, that is, by focusing on access opportunities of individuals when health needs and utilization decisions have not yet been revealed. In our approach, we account for both (i) the disparity of access among individuals having access and those having not, as well as (ii) the disparity of access conditions across the entire population. The measurement strategy we propose has the great advantage of being factor decomposable in such a way as to allow for the identification of the determinants of observed inequality of access to adequate care. An empirical application to breast cancer in Italy is reported to highlight the informative content of our methodology for policy purposes.

Keywords: health care; equality of opportunity; factor-decomposition; health policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I14 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2023-08-03
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Working Paper: Measuring Access and Inequality of Access to Health Care: a Policy-Oriented Decomposition (2023)
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