from Health Policy at http://bit.ly/2XfuiVQ on June 28, 2019 at 02:16PM
Publication date: Available online 27 June 2019
Source: Health Policy
Author(s): Marta Pascual-Sáez, David Cantarero-Prieto, Paloma Lanza-León
Abstract
In recent years, and because of the economic crisis, Spain’s government has been worried about changes in health poverty. In this paper, we examine individual health status measured subjectively (SAH) and we decompose some socio-economic determinants to analyse how this situation affects health. We focus on SAH to estimate the poverty trends over time using the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) index. For this purpose, we have used data provided by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Our results show a negative growth if a poor SAH status is chosen as a health poverty threshold, and a positive growth of health poverty, if a fair SAH status is chosen. Furthermore, we decompose some socio-economic factors (such as gender, age and education level) to study how these characteristics affect health poverty. Our findings, based on different subgroup decompositions, reveal a rise of health poverty in Spain.