Hardship financing, productivity loss, and the economic cost of illness and injury in Cambodia.

Background: Financial risk protection is a core dimension of universal health coverage. Hardship financing, defined as borrowing and selling land or assets to pay for healthcare, is a measure of last recourse. Increasing indebtedness and high interest rates, particularly among unregulated money lenders, can lead to a vicious cycle of poverty and exacerbate inequity.

Advancing universal health coverage in the COVID-19 era: an assessment of public health services technical efficiency and applied cost allocation in Cambodia.

Background: Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) is a global priority and a keystone element of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, COVID-19 is causing serious impacts on tax revenue and many countries are facing constraints to new investment in health. To advance UHC progress, countries can also focus on improving health system technical efficiency to maximize the service outputs given the current health financing levels.

A distributional regression approach to income-related inequality of health in Australia.

Background: Several studies have confirmed the existence of a significant positive relationship between income and health. Conventional regression techniques such as Ordinary Least Squares only help identify the effect of the covariates on the mean of the health variable. In this way, important information of the income-health relationship could be overlooked.

Defining and measuring health poverty.

Unlike other aspects of welfare (e.g. income), health has been relatively neglected when it comes to defining and measuring aspects of poverty.

A direct regression approach to decomposing socioeconomic inequality of health.

This paper presents a new regression-based decomposition of socioeconomic inequality of health that is more direct than other approaches. The method can be applied to both rank-dependent and level-dependent indicators of inequality. The response variable of our regression model is a simple reformulation of the measure of overall performance of an individual in the health and socioeconomic domains.

Socioeconomic Status and Health: A New Approach to the Measurement of Bivariate Inequality.

We suggest an alternative way to construct a family of indices of socioeconomic inequality of health. Our indices belong to the broad category of linear indices. In contrast to rank-dependent indices, which are defined in terms of the ranks of the socioeconomic variable and the levels of the health variable, our indices are based on the levels of both the socioeconomic and the health variable.

Using administrative data to look at changes in the level and distribution of out-of-pocket medical expenditure: An example using Medicare data from Australia.

Objectives: Australia's universal health insurance system Medicare generates very large amounts of data on out-of-pocket expenditure (OOPE), but only highly aggregated statistics are routinely published. Our primary purpose is to develop indices from the Medicare administrative data to quantify changes in the level and distribution of OOPE on out-of-hospital medical services over time.

Methods: Data were obtained from the Australian Hypertension and Absolute Risk Study, which involved patients aged 55 years and over (n=2653).

Structural equation modeling for decomposing rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health: an empirical study.

We present a flexible structural equation modeling (SEM) framework for the regression-based decomposition of rank-dependent indicators of socioeconomic inequality of health and compare it with simple ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The SEM framework forms the basis for a proper use of the most prominent one- and two-dimensional decompositions and provides an argument for using the bivariate multiple regression model for two-dimensional decomposition. Within the SEM framework, the two-dimensional decomposition integrates the feedback mechanism between health and socioeconomic status and allows for different sets of determinants of these variables.

A dual Atkinson measure of socioeconomic inequality of health.

The Atkinson index of income inequality is based on a comparison of the average income with the equivalent income, where the equivalent income is defined as the level of income that, if given to everyone, would generate the same social welfare as the existing distribution of income. This paper explores the possibility of extending this approach to the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health. It assumes a social evaluation function that depends upon two variables: socioeconomic status as well as health status.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?"--Distributional sensitivity in the measurement of socioeconomic inequality of health.

This paper explores four alternative indices for measuring health inequalities in a way that takes into account attitudes towards inequality. First, we revisit the extended concentration index which has been proposed to make it possible to introduce changes into the distributional value judgements implicit in the standard concentration index. Next, we suggest an alternative index based on a different weighting scheme.

Measuring socioeconomic inequality in health, health care and health financing by means of rank-dependent indices: a recipe for good practice.

The tools to be used and other choices to be made when measuring socioeconomic inequalities with rank-dependent inequality indices have recently been debated in this journal. This paper adds to this debate by stressing the importance of the measurement scale, by providing formal proofs of several issues in the debate, and by lifting the curtain on the confusing debate between adherents of absolute versus relative health differences. We end this paper with a 'matrix' that provides guidelines on the usefulness of several rank-dependent inequality indices under varying circumstances.

Can a single indicator measure both attainment and shortfall inequality?

When a distribution can be described either in terms of attainment or in terms of shortfall, the classical inequality measures appear to be one-sided. I show that it is possible to find indicators which simultaneously measure attainment and shortfall inequality. I derive one indicator belonging to the Gini family, and another belonging to Coefficient of Variation family.

Correcting the concentration index.

In recent years attention has been drawn to several shortcomings of the Concentration Index, a frequently used indicator of the socioeconomic inequality of health. Some modifications have been suggested, but these are only partial remedies. This paper proposes a corrected version of the Concentration Index which is superior to the original Concentration Index and its variants, in the sense that it is a rank-dependent indicator which satisfies four key requirements (transfer, level independence, cardinal invariance, and mirror).