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Equity and efficiency in health status and health services utilization: a household perspective.


 Health economists examine the existing pattern of disease, the initial distributional structure of public policies, and the behavioral response of households in allocating resources towards health promoting activities to understand the health consequences of public fiscal and income policies. They hope that this analysis will guide health policymakers to minimize differentials in health service utilization and health outcomes. The household production of health serves as the general framework. The analysis reveals that the demand for health and the demand for health services depend on the organization of government fiscal and distribution policies. Further the demand for health services hinges on its own price as well as on the prices of other inputs including nutrition and environmental sanitation. The government basically subsidizes these inputs, but it does not equally distribute the subsidies. For people with the lower subsidy on other health inputs, the health benefit from using health services tend to be lower. Thus the fact that these households have a low demand for health and low use of health services may indicate a rational decision which reveals low perceived productivity of these inputs. Therefore policymakers should include the effect of public subsidies when examining the effect of public policies on health status. These policies may include structural adjustment or cost recovery schemes. In fact, as evidenced in a case study in the Ivory Coast, structural adjustments did not affect the rural poor and urban poor, but instead adversely affected middle class urban households. Hence policymakers should not limit their examinations to traditional income groups.
