Health inequalities and development plans in Iran : an analysis of the past three decades (1984-2010)

Hossein Zare, Antonio J. Trujillo, Julia Driessen, Mojtaba Ghasemi, Gisselle Gallego

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    45 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Introduction. Reducing inequalities in health care is one of the main challenges in all countries. In Iran as in other oil-exporting upper middle income countries, we expected to witness fewer inequalities especially in the health sector with the increase in governmental revenues. Methods. This study presents an inequalities assessment of health care expenditures in Iran. We used data from the Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) in Iran from 1984-2010. The analysis included 308,735 urban and 342,532 rural households. Results: The results suggest heightened inequality in health care expenditures in Iran over the past three decades, including an increase in the gap between urban and rural areas. Furthermore, inflation has affected the poor more than the rich. The Kakwani progressivity index in all years is positive, averaging 0.436 in rural and 0.470 in urban areas during the time period of analysis. Compared to inequality in income distribution over the last 30 years, health expenditures continuously show more inequality and progressivity over the same period of time. Conclusions: According to the result of our study, during this period Iran introduced four National Development Plans (NDPs); however, the NDPs failed to provide sustainable strategies for reducing inequalities in health care expenditures. Policies that protect vulnerable groups should be prioritized.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number42
    Number of pages12
    JournalInternational Journal for Equity in Health
    Volume13
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2014

    Open Access - Access Right Statement

    © 2014 Zare et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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