An Analytical Study on Healthcare Inflation Rate and Its Most Important Components in Iran

The Relationship Between the Health Transformation Program and Health Expenditures: Evidence From an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Testing Approach

OBJECTIVES

As health expenditure increases every year, countries try to provide accessible health services to society and try to protect individuals from the expenses they cannot overcome by investigating the reason for this increase. Especially with the arrangements made in the health systems in developing countries such as Turkey, it has been tried to take the control of dramatic increases in health expenditure. Based on this issue, in this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of income per capita, annual inflation, and health reform called as Health Transformation Program on the health expenditure per capita in Turkey.

METHODS

This study reflected the effects of income, inflation, and the reform on the total health expenditure through the autoregressive distributed lag. This study covered the years between 1985 and 2016 for Turkey.

RESULTS

As a result of this study, there was a positive relationship between health expenditure and income and a negative relationship with the reform (P < .05).

CONCLUSION

According to the results of this study, it is suggested that health expenditures can be kept under control with improvements such as encouraging individuals to use more primary healthcare services than curative health services and increasing the quality of service without compromising the equity in financing.

Infant Mortality and Inflation in China: Based on the Mixed Frequency VAR Analyses

Reducing neonatal mortality is an important goal in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and with the outbreak of the new crown epidemic and severe global inflation, it is extremely important to explore the relationship between inflation and infant mortality. This paper investigates the causal relationship between inflation and infant mortality using a mixed frequency vector autoregressive model (MF-VAR) without any filtering procedure, along with impulse response analysis and forecast misspecification variance decomposition, and compares it with a low frequency vector autoregressive model (LF-VAR). We find that there is a causal relationship between inflation and infant mortality, specifically, that is inflation increases infant mortality. Moreover, the contribution of CPI to IMR is greater in the forecast error variance decomposition in the MF-VAR model compared to the LF-VAR model, indicating that CPI has stronger explanatory power for IMR in mixed-frequency data. The results of the study have important implications for China and other developing countries in reducing infant mortality and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Policymakers should focus on inflation as a macroeconomic variable that reduces the potential negative impact of inflation on infant mortality. The results of the analysis further emphasize the importance of price stability in the context of global inflation caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic outbreak.

Tracking socio-economic inequalities in healthcare utilization in Iran: a repeated cross-sectional analysis

Background

Although some healthcare reforms such as Health Transformation Plan (HTP) were implemented in Iran to provide required healthcare services, few studies have been conducted to track the impacts of these reforms on socio-economic inequality in healthcare utilization. This study aims to track socio-economic inequalities in healthcare utilization and their changes between 2008 and 2016 in Iran.

Methods

Required data were obtained from two of Iran’s utilization of healthcare services survey conducted in 2008 and 2016. Erreygers concentration index (EI) was used to measure inequality in the utilization of outpatient and inpatient healthcare services (UOH and UIH). The decomposition of EI (DEI) was used to explain healthcare utilization inequality. Oaxaca decomposition (OD) was also employed to track the changes in EI in this period.

Result

Inequality in UOH increased from 0.105 to 0.133 in the studied years, indicating the pro-rich distribution of UOH. Inequality in UIH decreased from 0.0558 to − 0.006. DEI showed that economic status was the main factor that contributed to inequality in the UOH and UIH. OD showed that residence in rural areas and supplementary insurance were the main contributing factors in the increased inequality of UOH. Moreover, OD also showed that economic status was the main contributing factor in the reduced inequality of UIH.

Conclusion

While Iran still suffers from significant socio-economic inequalities in UOH, it seems that healthcare reforms, especially HTP, have reduced UIH inequality. Expanding healthcare reforms into the outpatient sector and also implementing effective health financing policies could be recommended as a remedy against UOH inequality.