Concentration of Health Care Accessibility and Health Inequalities

Abstract

Assessment of unmet health needs, which provide information about accessibility of health care in the countries of the so called new EU is discussed in this paper. The relation between a social determinant of health, i.e. income of the inhabitants and a subjective assessment of accessibility of health care. The study refers to the concept of sensitivity of the health care system – potential accessibility of a patient to the benefits. There were two assumptions adopted, firstly – a high sensibility of the health care system and satisfaction of the health care providers is necessary to improve the general health of a population and, secondly, there is a relation between subjective accessibility and social determinants of health.
The average value of the concentration for five individual categories of an income level, (Q0_20), (Q20_40), (Q40_60), (Q60_80), (Q80_100), assumes a value up to 2500. It indicates moderate concentration for the analysed unmet needs of medical examination in subgroups of the categories of income.
It was estimated that in some countries of the so called new EU, i.e. the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, the concentration of the level of unmet health needs diminished. Whereas in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria and Malta, the concentration increased.
The study of the existing correlations between the level of concentration of the state of health state in relation to income in populations and the concentration of unmet health needs in the years 2007–2015 showed that the concentration of unmet health needs increases along with increasing concentration of the state of health. Measurement of inequalities in health and normalised indexes, i.e. the Theil and Herfindahl-Hirschman indexes were used to measure the level of health needs in time.