Horizontal Inequity in Access to Health Care in Four South American Cities

Ana Balsa (), Maximo Rossi () and Patricia Triunfo ()

No 1509, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: This paper analyzes and compares socioeconomic inequalities in the use of healthcare services by the elderly in four South-American cities: Buenos Aires, Santiago, Montevideo and San Pablo. We use data from SABE, a survey on Health, Well-being and Aging administered in 2000. After having accounted for socioeconomic inequalities in healthcare needs, we find socioeconomic inequities favoring the rich in the use of preventive services (mammograms, pap tests, breast examinations, and prostate exams) in all of the studied cities. We also find inequities in the likelihood of having a medical visit in Santiago and Montevideo, and in some measures of quality of access in Santiago, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires. Santiago depicts the highest inequities in medical visits and Uruguay the worse indicators in mammograms and pap scans tests. For all cities, inequities in preventive services at least double inequities in other services. We do not find evidence of a trade-off between levels of access and equity in access to healthcare services. The decomposition of healthcare inequalities suggests that inequities within each health system are more important than between systems.

Keywords: inequalities; healthcare; medical visit; preventive services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 I11 I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2009-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-lam and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/2132 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Horizontal Inequity in Access to Health Care in Four South American Cities (2011)
Working Paper: Horizontal inequity in access to health care in four South American cities (2009)
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:ude:wpaper:1509

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Doneschi () and ().