Department of Economics, Bar-Ilan University, 52900 Ramat-Gan, Israel.
Isr J Health Policy Res. 2013 Dec 19;2(1):49. doi: 10.1186/2045-4015-2-49.
This paper examines whether individuals facing the threat of poverty are curtailing their consumption of various goods and services in a given order and, if among the expenditures that are cut back, there are also health expenditures. The location of individuals in this order of cutback is then used to derive the degree of their deprivation and the factors that affect the extent of this deprivation.
This order of curtailment of expenditures is obtained on the basis of an algorithm originally devised to derive the order of acquisition of durable goods. Having found the order of curtailment of expenditures on the basis of the 2003 Israel Social Survey, we then estimate an ordered logit regression whose latent dependent variable is assumed to measure the individual degree of deprivation.
The results of this estimation show that, other things constant, the individual latent level of deprivation increases with the size of the household, first increases and then decreases with the age of the individual, is higher when the individual has children under the age of five, has a low educational level, a low income, and when he/she is separated or divorced. Finally, deprivation is found to be lower among individuals with good health.
Discovering the order of curtailment of expenditures, including health expenditures, of individuals facing economic difficulties and finding the determinants of the extent of such deprivation should help policy makers focus their attention on the population subgroups that are most likely to curtail their health expenditures when facing economic difficulties.
本文考察了面临贫困威胁的个人是否会按照一定顺序削减各种商品和服务的消费，如果削减的支出中包括医疗支出，那么哪些支出会被削减。然后，根据个人在削减顺序中的位置，得出他们的贫困程度以及影响这种贫困程度的因素。
这种支出削减顺序是基于最初用于推导耐用消费品购买顺序的算法得出的。根据 2003 年以色列社会调查得出支出削减顺序后，我们估计了一个有序逻辑回归模型，其潜在的因变量被假设为衡量个人贫困程度。
该估计的结果表明，在其他条件不变的情况下，个体潜在的贫困程度随着家庭规模的增大而增加，先增加后减少随着个体年龄的增长而减少，当个体有五岁以下的孩子、教育水平低、收入低以及离异或分居时，个体的贫困程度更高。最后，发现健康状况良好的个体的贫困程度较低。
发现面临经济困难的个人的支出削减顺序，包括医疗支出，以及发现这种贫困程度的决定因素，应该有助于政策制定者将注意力集中在最有可能在面临经济困难时削减医疗支出的人群子组上。
