Economic environment and health care coverage: Analysis of social acceptance of access restrictive policies applied in Spain in the context of economic crisis

Abstract

Society wellbeing is one the main goals of economic development. During the XX century, societies succeeded increasing their standard of living and the general welfare. But, in 2008, barely begun the XXI century, the strongest economic crisis ever known, destroyed much of the social achievements. Although the European Union had to deal with this situation by designing common policies, the member states have handled this crisis in many different ways. Their restrictive budgets affected a lot of social policies and its effects were mainly suffered for the most disadvantaged people. In this paper we deal with a structural equations model for assessing the population acceptation of those restrictions in health expenses. Spain has one of the best public health system all over the world, and that is the reason for choosing this country to conduct our survey. Our results point out the general disagreement with the cuts in health expenses.

Social Effects of Economic Crisis: Risk of Exclusion. An Overview of the European Context

“…This method analyses all the interactions between the latent variables and shows the sign of the relationships between them as well as their relative importance. This is an appropriate method for analysing social issues and it has been applied widely in academic literature, particularly in recent times [46][47][48][49]. To test hypotheses H10 and H11, we conducted a t-test for testing equal means, which is an adequate method of proving differences supported by statistics, instead of just comparing by checking the values of means and standard deviation and it is particularly useful in the field of economics [50,51].…”

From public vs. private to public/private mix in healthcare: lessons from the Israeli and the Spanish cases

“…As a result of the 2008 economic crisis, in 2012 the Spanish government passed a royal decree (16/2012) that, in a certain way, rolled back the universal model, including in it characteristics of a Bismarckian, social security regime [43,52,53]. The system remained universal for emergencies; pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care; people under age 18; and those with severe disabilities.…”

Sustainable Development, Poverty, and Risk of Exclusion for Young People in the European Union: The Case of NEETs

“…However, this situation in the labor market was similar to what happened in other areas of the economy. Specifically, the general environment, due to the policies adopted in those countries to deal with the economic situation, which have been accompanied by restrictions on public spending on fundamental aspects, such as health [23] and education [24]. As a result, some social groups, like today's youth, who were in their childhood or adolescence at the time of application of these policies and, therefore, have been affected by them, are at risk of being part of the NEETs group.…”

“…The European Union considers youth to be those aged between 15-24 years, but for analyzing NEETs, EUROSTAT provide data for those aged from 15 to 29 years. In this paper, we take all these range of age [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], due to the relevance for the last stretch of ages. The economic environment latent variable (ξ 1 ) was constructed with the aim of collecting information about different spheres of the economy: One related to the general economic position of the country, the other to consumers' purchasing capability and another about the public policies that exist to support citizens.…”