Measuring inequality and Inequity in Health and Health Care

Abstract

This article examines the measurement of the success of the redistributive function describing strategies used for measuring the inequality of the outcomes of a health care system in terms of the use of care. The discussion of inequalities can be divided into health, health care, and health care payments. This article is concerned with the association between income, on the one hand, and health and health care, on the other. It further discusses the potential underlying causal pathways of this association. It explains in detail that a significant association or causal effect is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the presence of inequalities. Finally, it reviews the economics approaches of measuring socioeconomic inequalities in health and health care that are applied in the empirical literature. The measurement tools developed and used by health economists to analyze socioeconomic inequalities in health and health care are also discussed.