Equity in health has to be distinguished from equity in access to health care, or equity in the distribution of health care resources. We take as a working definition of health for our purposes the number of quality adjusted life years that a person may expect to enjoy over his or her lifetime. Although we mostly follow the economists' custom of regarding equity as synonymous with reducing inequalities in health, we also consider the much richer variety of concepts employed by philosophers when discussing distributive justice. Here however we have distinguished notions of justice which are essentially procedural from those which are substantive, concentrating mainly on the latter. What we have sought to do is to identify the implications of various philosophical theories of justice for the way in which a welfare economist might appraise a particular distribution of health within a community. To do this we distinguish theories which place constraints on admissible outcomes (the health opportunity set), from theories which require the social welfare function (or maximand) to have particular properties. This classification is summarised in the Table 1, which is the key exhibit around which the analysis and exposition is organised.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF This chapter was published in: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.) Handbook of Health Economics, , chapter 35, pages 1863-1910, 2000.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Heidi Boesdal).
Related research
This chapter was published in the following book, which is listed on IDEAS: A. J. Culyer & J. P. Newhouse (ed.), 2000.
"Handbook of Health Economics,"
Handbook of Health Economics,
Elsevier,
edition 1, volume 1, number 1, September.
[Downloadable!] (restricted) Keywords:
Find related papers by JEL classification: I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)