A Resource-sensitive framework for defining and measuring equality of opportunity in health care

We offer a new framework for dening and measuring equality of opportunity in health care, where (i) the chance of access to health care is disentangled from the utilization of health services, and (ii) both the rate of access and inequality of access to health care are accounted for the measurement of disparities in health opportunities. The latter are conceived as inversely related to the cost of a (bundle of) health treatment(s) of appropriate quality which an individual would have to pay (out-of-pocket) if the need for the health treatment emerges. In the ex-ante perspective we adopt, what is salient is the distribution of costs across cells, where each cell is dened by a set of characteristics determining access barriers to care (e.g., geographic location, assistance needs). On these premises, a general index for the measurement of equality of access to health care is then developed and resource-conditional policy suggestions are deducted. A simple application based on real data shows that the methodology we provide can be easily applied.