Health Status Determinants: Lifestyle, Environment, Health Care Resources and Efficiency

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on the contribution of health care and other determinants to the health status of the population and to provide evidence on whether or not health care resources are producing similar value for money across OECD countries. First, it discusses the pros and cons of various indicators of the health status, concluding that mortality and longevity indicators have some drawbacks but remain the best available proxies. Second, it suggests that changes in health care spending, lifestyle factors (smoking and alcohol consumption as well as diet), education, pollution and income have been important factors behind improvements in health status. Third, it derives estimates of countries' relative performance in transforming health care resources into longevity from two different methods -panel data regressions and data envelopment analysis -which give remarkably consistent results. The empirical estimates suggest that potential efficiency gains might be large enough to raise life expectancy at birth by almost three years on average for OECD countries, while a 10% increase in total health spending would increase life expectancy by three to four months.

Determinants of Health Status and Public Policies Implications – Lessons for Romania

“…These prove that while the level of incomes, education and use of medical services (including the prevention ones) positively influence this indicator, an inadequate life style (which comprises of alcohol and tobacco consumption for instance) act in the opposite way, each of them having a different intensity for women and men (Joumard et al, 2008).…”

Similarity of Perceived Health Between Household Members: The “Mutual Influences” Hypothesis

“…However, a limited number of studies on population health have formally made use of a hierarchical structure accounting for both geographical and relational levels (Subramanian et al 2003;Ferrer et al 2005). The geographical area of residence has been studied as being potentially responsible for exposure to environmental risk factors (Martuzzi et al 2002;Biggeri et al 2004;Pearce and Dorling 2006), economic deprivation (Kennedy et al 1998;Subramanian et al 2001), social conflicts (Kawachi et al 1999), and, in some cases, uneven health care provision (Joumard et al 2008;Jagger et al 2008), thus demonstrating that all of these factors have some influence on health outcomes. Less investigated is the meso-level, which typically refers to the network of relations binding the individual to the people close to him/her in everyday life (Agneessens et al 2006;Rivellini 2006).…”

Environmental determinants of life expectancy at birth in Turkey

“…[1][2][3][4] It is defined as the number of years, a newborn infant would live if prevailing patterns of mortality at the time of its birth were to stay the same through the rest of its life. 5 In a health system, if life expectancy of a country is higher than the other countries with the same resources, it means that this country's health system is better than the others and also its population is healthier.…”