Equity in the finance and delivery of health care: some tentative cross-country comparisons

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