Desigualdades sociais em saúde: evidências empíricas sobre o caso brasileiro

The aim of this paper is to measure the socioeconomic health inequality in Brazil considering the differences among the federal states. We estimate the health concentration index. This work has two main contributions: first, it considers the differences in the health level of population among the federal states and second, it measures the socioeconomic health inequality considering all socioeconomic groups. The socioeconomic variables used are years of formal schooling and familiar income per capita. Even though, the majority of papers in the literature estimate health inequality using mortality as health indicator, in this paper we use morbidity measures. Morbidity measures are advantageous because they capture differences in the life quality of individuals in spite of only considering the cause of death. The data base used is PNAD (Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra Domiciliar), a National Household Survey accomplished by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The main findings of this work is to perceive the existence of social health inequality in Brazil. Almost all health concentration indexes estimated showed a health inequality favoring the higher income groups. This result was robust for almost all health indicators except when the criteria used was the proportion of individuals in the whole population that presented chronic disease. This result was verified in all regions except the Northeastern region when we used familiar income per capita to classify social economic groups.