Essay On Quality Of Health Care

Abstract

In this paper, we try to analyse whether healthcare expenditure is a significant driver of quality of health measured in terms of life expectancy at birth. We also include in our analysis percentage of government expenditure, presence of doctors in an area and adult literacy rate as independent variables and tried to find out whether they are also significant drivers of quality of healthcare offered in countries.

I. Introduction

Quality of healthcare offered is reflective of the economic development of any country. This addresses the basic needs of the citizens. With the breaking out of infectious diseases like Ebola, AIDS etc. it is becoming increasingly difficult for the countries to address the need for development without catering

Data

We have used life expectancy at birth as the statistic representative of quality of health for a particular country. Life expectancy at birth simply implies the number of years a newborn is about to live on an average. It takes into account mortality for all age groups and rate of infectious diseases. This is used as the dependent variable.

First independent variable in our study is total healthcare expenditure per capita which is inclusive of both government and private spending. The rationale behind per capita expenditure is to account for the variance across countries included in our study. Our initial assumption is that healthcare expenditure will have a positive correlation with life expectancy.

The next independent variable is per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Similar to healthcare expenditure, per capita GDP is taken for the variance across countries. Higher per capita GDP will naturally imply more spending power in healthcare and in turn better health. Also, higher GDP is generally synonymous with higher standards of living which will impact on quality of health positively. This is the reason for taking into account GDP otherwise this effect would have been mistakenly attributed to healthcare