Claudio Sapelli () (Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.) Bernardita Vial () (Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.)
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The Chilean health system involves both the private and public sectors in the provision of insurance and health care. It is characterized by much wider private insurance coverage than in the rest of Latin America (at about 30% of population). The coexistence of both these providers, with the private sector providing better quality and catering predominantly to the rich, produces the perception that access to good health care is inequitable. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether this is true or not. However, due to the fact that we lack reliable quality data, we will assume that quality is the same across the board. Hence what we will evaluate is whether there is a pattern related to income levels in the utilization of health services. The results show that the Chilean health system is similar to an average European health system. That is, there is no relation between income and utilization if we consider medical visits and days of hospitalization (we only have data for comparative purposes for utilization defined this way). If we add laboratory exams and surgery then utilization does show a positive correlation with income, but concentrated in the richest twenty percent of the population. This quintile has a standardized expenditure (standardized for demographic characteristics and morbidity) that is 30% higher than the rest of the population. This difference is small if we compare it to the differences in income distribution (income is 20 times higher in the richest quintile than in the poorest quintile). The results of this study show that health care utilization in Chile is very similar across income groups. This shows that if the Chileans do have different access to good health care, the difference occurs only in the quality of the health services and not in the number of health services.
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Article provided by Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. in its journal Cuadernos de Economía.
Volume (Year): 35 (1998) Issue (Month): 106 () Pages: 343-382 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML,
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health