Determinants of Impoverishing Health Expenditure in Iran's Health Sector

Health is the most valuable material property of human and the health sector is one of the most important sectors in community. Therefore, justice is the key issue in economics in general and emphatic in Islamic economics. According to an approach concerning equity in health sector, justice occurs when socio-economic factors do not expose people with impoverishing costs. In this paper, based on a large volumes of data between the years 2007 to 2011, we evaluate the impact of household socio-economic status on the probability of facing with impoverishing health expenditure using Ordered Logit Technique and the STATA software. This probability decreases with the factors such as: the employment of household head, homeownership, the most educated people in the family, more per capita area of residence, family being in high income deciles and insurance coverage and increases with a growth in household size and living in more developed provinces. The poor effects of insurance coverage and its impact on the probability of households facing impoverishing health expenditure indicate its inefficiency. The probability of households facing impoverishing health expenditure has increased from 2007 to 2010 yearly, but in 2011, as Iranian targeted subsidy plan was implemented, this probability has not been significant. This should be due to the immediate and short-run influences of subsidy plan and determining its medium term and long-run effects requires further studies in the future. In this paper, with a large volume of data, it was tried to explain this problem by means of investigating the effect of new variables and the impact of implementation of government policies and subsidies plan.