Resumen de Estimating utilisation of health care
In an era in which the share of the public budget taken by health care rises, it becomes increasingly important to determine the basic forces influencing the demand for medical services and the decision process underlying it. In this paper, redefining health care consumption in terms of utilisation, we explore how alternatives estimation models perform for a cross section of data from the British Household Panel Survey. Grouped data regression is shown to be the most appropriate modelling approach due to the nature of the dependent variable. We find the familiar result the frequency of physician visit is clearly responsive to both socio-economic characteristics and need, proxied by morbidity.
