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Redistributive Effects of the Swedish Health Care Financing System

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  • Gerdtham, Ulf-G.

    (Centre for Health Economics)

  • Sundberg, Gun

    (Department of Economics)

Abstract

The paper investigates the redistributive effects of the Swedish health care financing system in 1980 and 1990 for four different financial sources: County council taxes, payroll taxes, direct payments oand state grants. The redistributive effects are decomposed into vertical, horizontal and reranking segments for each of the four financial sources. The data used in this study is based on probability samples of the Swedish population, the Level of Living Survey (LNU) from 1981 and 1991. The paper concludes that the Swedish health care financing system is weakly progressive, although direct payments are regressive. There are some horizontal inequity and reranking, which mainly comes from the county council taxes, since those tax rates vary for each county councils. The implication is that, to some extent, people with equal income are treated unequally.

Suggested Citation

  • Gerdtham, Ulf-G. & Sundberg, Gun, 1996. "Redistributive Effects of the Swedish Health Care Financing System," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 115, Stockholm School of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:hastef:0115
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    Cited by:

    1. Moradi, Alireza, 2011. "Equity of Health Care Financing: An Application to Iran," MPRA Paper 33489, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Alice Sanwald & Engelbert Theurl, 2015. "Out-of-pocket payments in the Austrian healthcare system - a distributional analysis," Working Papers 2015-05, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck.
    3. Luca Crivelli & Paola Salari, 2012. "Fiscal federalism and income redistribution through healthcare financing: An empirical analysis for the Swiss cantons," CEPRA working paper 1204, USI Università della Svizzera italiana.
    4. John E. Ataguba & Hyacinth E. Ichoku & Chijioke O. Nwosu & James Akazili, 2020. "An Alternative Approach to Decomposing the Redistributive Effect of Health Financing Between and Within Groups Using the Gini Index: The Case of Out-of-Pocket Payments in Nigeria," Applied Health Economics and Health Policy, Springer, vol. 18(6), pages 747-757, December.
    5. Mohammad Hajizadeh & Luke Brian Connelly & James Robert Gerard Butler, 2014. "Health Policy and Equity of Health Care Financing in Australia: 1973–2010," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 60(2), pages 298-322, June.
    6. Hyacinth Ementa Ichoku & William Munpuibeyi Fonta, 2006. "The Distributional Impact of Healthcare Financing in Nigeria: A Case Study of Enugu State," Working Papers PMMA 2006-17, PEP-PMMA.
    7. John E. Ataguba, 2021. "The Impact of Financing Health Services on Income Inequality in an Unequal Society: The Case of South Africa," Applied Health Economics and Health Policy, Springer, vol. 19(5), pages 721-733, September.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Equity; health care; financing; redistributive effects;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D3 - Microeconomics - - Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

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