Is Health Care demand rationed by income and other determinants? An empirical assessment for Italy

Journal title STUDI ECONOMICI
Author/s Rossella Bardazzi
Publishing Year 2009 Issue 2009/97 Language English
Pages 33 P. 111-143 File size 618 KB
DOI 10.3280/STE2009-097004
DOI is like a bar code for intellectual property: to have more infomation click here

Below, you can see the article first page

If you want to buy this article in PDF format, you can do it, following the instructions to buy download credits

Article preview

FrancoAngeli is member of Publishers International Linking Association, Inc (PILA), a not-for-profit association which run the CrossRef service enabling links to and from online scholarly content.

The Italian national health service was funded in 1978 with the goal of providing uniform and comprehensive care under the inspiration of the Republic’s Constitution. It is important to assess to what extent the health service meets the potential demand of the population and if the socio-economic status of the patient - mainly income and education - may ration the access to healthcare. This paper offers an empirical assessment of the determinants of healthcare demand in Italy for a detailed range of services including diagnostic tests and hospital services, not often analyzed in the empirical literature. An econometric hurdle model is applied to individual microdata from a large-scale survey. From our results, some accessibility problems seem to arise for persons who have fewer alternatives in the private market - with lower income, less educated, not privately insured - and living in the Southern part of the country.

Jel codes: C34, C35, C51, D12, I11

Rossella Bardazzi, Is Health Care demand rationed by income and other determinants? An empirical assessment for Italy in "STUDI ECONOMICI " 97/2009, pp 111-143, DOI: 10.3280/STE2009-097004