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Who benefits from health services in South Africa?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2012

John Ele-Ojo Ataguba  and
Di McIntyre
John Ele-Ojo Ataguba*
Affiliation:
Lecturer, Health Economics Unit, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Di McIntyre
Affiliation:
South African Research Chair in ‘Health and Wealth’, Health Economics Unit, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
*
*Correspondence to: John Ele-Ojo Ataguba, Health Economics Unit, School of Public Health and Family Medicine, Falmouth Annex, Medical Campus, Observatory, Cape Town, 7925, South Africa. Email: John.Ataguba@uct.ac.za
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Abstract

South Africa is considering major health service restructuring to move towards a universal system. This calls for understanding the challenges in the existing health system. The paper, therefore, comprehensively evaluates an aspect of current health system performance – the benefit incidence of health services. It seeks to understand how the benefits from using health services in South Africa are currently distributed across socio-economic groups. Using a nationally representative household survey, results show that lower socio-economic groups benefit less than their richer counterparts from both public and private sector health services, and that the distribution of service benefits is not in line with their need for care.

Type
Articles
Information
Health Economics, Policy and Law , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 21 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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