IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mes/eaeuec/v42y2004i1p43-55.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Consumer Spending for Pharmaceuticals and Its Implications for Health Care Financing: The Case of Kazakhstan

Author

Listed:
  • NAZMI SARI

Abstract

The health care sector in the countries of the former Soviet Union experienced significant changes in the 1990s and moved away from the principle of providing free care. Kazakhstan experienced a similar trend in financing pharmaceuticals. After the introduction of direct patient contributions for outpatient pharmaceuticals, the economic burden on poor and rural people increased significantly. This article examines various policy changes in promoting equity and analyzes the implications and feasibility of subsidy programs on the health care budget. The simulations from a two-part model suggest that the program covering the poor increases the health care budget by 7.7 percent. This increases to 20 percent when extended to people in rural areas. Instead of adopting a straightforward subsidy program for certain groups, this article identifies policy alternatives that may enhance social welfare by decreasing economic inefficiencies.

Suggested Citation

  • Nazmi Sari, 2004. "Consumer Spending for Pharmaceuticals and Its Implications for Health Care Financing: The Case of Kazakhstan," Eastern European Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(1), pages 43-55, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:mes:eaeuec:v:42:y:2004:i:1:p:43-55
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://mesharpe.metapress.com/link.asp?target=contribution&id=KPHP8Q1NEP67CV7K
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brück, Tilman & Esenaliev, Damir & Kroeger, Antje & Kudebayeva, Alma & Mirkasimov, Bakhrom & Steiner, Susan, 2014. "Household survey data for research on well-being and behavior in Central Asia," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 819-835.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mes:eaeuec:v:42:y:2004:i:1:p:43-55. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/MEEE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.