Dear Colleagues
Below information and abstracts of two papers in the January 2003 issue of the Journal of Health Economics which may be of interest to some of you.
(Note mailing system may break up the links onto more than one line)
Best wishes
David McDaid
LSE Health and Social Care
Journal of Health Economics, 05393, Vol 22 Iss 1 January 2003
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jnlnr/05393
Inequalities in self-reported health: validation of a new approach to measurement
E.v. Doorslaer, A.M. Jones
pp 61-87
Full text via ScienceDirect :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=GatewayURL&_origin=CONTENTS&_method=citationSearch&_piikey=S0167629602000802&_version=1&md5=4558143109cd47f2503f87e5000f9e14
Abstract
This paper assesses the internal validity of using the McMaster `Health Utility Index Mark III' (HUI) to scale the responses on the typical self-assessed health (SAH) question, "how do you rate your health status in general?" It compares alternative procedures to impose cardinality on the ordinal responses. These include OLS, ordered probit and interval regression approaches. The cardinal measures of health are used to compute and to decompose concentration indices for income-related inequality in health. These results are validated by comparison with the individual variation in the `benchmark' HUI responses obtained from the Canadian `National Population Health Survey 1994-1995'. The interval regression approach, which exploits a mapping from the empirical distribution function (EDF) of HUI into SAH, outperforms the other approaches. In addition, we show how the method can be extended to allow for differences in SAH thresholds across different groups of people and to measuring and decomposing `pure' health inequality.
Author Keywords: Health inequality; Health measurement; Health-related quality of life; Canada
Prejudice, clinical uncertainty and stereotyping as sources of health disparities
A.I. Balsa, T.G. McGuire
pp 89-116
Full text via ScienceDirect :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=GatewayURL&_origin=CONTENTS&_method=citationSearch&_piikey=S016762960200098X&_version=1&md5=2f3429a1750375e646b3d33ba7e35138
Abstract
Disparities in health can result from the clinical encounter between a doctor and a patient. This paper studies three possible mechanisms: prejudice of doctors in the form of being less willing to interact with members of minority groups, clinical uncertainty associated with doctors' differential interpretation of symptoms from minority patients or from doctor's distinct priors across races, and stereotypes doctors hold about health-related behavior of minority patients. Within a unified conceptual framework, we show how all three can lead to disparities in health and health services use. We also show that the effect of social policy depends critically on the underlying cause of disparities.
Author Keywords: Prejudice; Stereotype; Health disparities
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