Education-related inequity in healthcare with heterogeneous reporting of health
- 4 July 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society
- Vol. 174 (3), 639-664
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-985x.2011.00706.x
Abstract
Summary. Reliance on self-rated health to proxy medical need can bias estimation of education-related inequity in healthcare utilization. We correct this bias both by instrumenting self-rated health with objective health indicators and by purging self-rated health of reporting heterogeneity that is identified from health vignettes. Using data on elderly Europeans, we find that instrumenting self-rated health shifts the distribution of visits to a doctor in the direction of inequality favouring the better educated. There is a further, and typically larger, shift in the same direction when correction is made for the tendency of the better educated to rate their health more negatively.Keywords
This publication has 43 references indexed in Scilit:
- Validating the use of Anchoring Vignettes for the Correction of Response Scale Differences in Subjective QuestionsJournal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society, 2011
- Differential health reporting by education level and its impact on the measurement of health inequalities among older EuropeansInternational Journal of Epidemiology, 2008
- Socioeconomic Inequalities in Health in 22 European CountriesThe New England Journal of Medicine, 2008
- The association between self-rated health and mortality in different socioeconomic groups in the GAZEL cohort studyInternational Journal of Epidemiology, 2007
- A new comprehensive and international view on ageing: introducing the ‘Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe’European Journal of Ageing, 2005
- Cut-point shift and index shift in self-reported healthJournal of Health Economics, 2004
- Health care reform and the number of doctor visits—an econometric analysisJournal of Applied Econometrics, 2004
- Explaining income‐related inequalities in doctor utilisation in EuropeHealth Economics, 2004
- Development of the EURO–D scale – a European Union initiative to compare symptoms of depression in 14 European centresThe British Journal of Psychiatry, 1999
- Equity and the distribution of UK National Health Service resourcesJournal of Health Economics, 1991