Equity in the Finance and Delivery of Health Care: Some Tentative Cross-Country Comparisons

Equity is widely acknowledged to be an important in the field of health care. Indeed, McLachlan Maynard (1982) have gone so far as to suggest ' the vast majority of the population would elect equity to be the prime consideration' (p. 556) —a endorsed by Mooney (1986, p. 145). Several have investigated how successful their country's delivery and/or financing system is achieving its stated equity goals. In general the of these studies is to compare the current situation with some ideal or 'target* situation. Le (1978), for example, in what has become a study in the field, compares the distributions socio-economic groups of illness and public on health care in Britain in 1972, and that the National Health Service (NHS) failed to achieve equity in the delivery of health.