The Palestinian Economy. Theoretical and Practical Challenges

378
Abu-Zaineh – Mataria
the HI appear to be relatively slightly more important in the case of primary- (circa 12%)
and secondary-level (13 %) compared to tertiary-level (about 8%). Similarly, for almost
all levels of health care and in the two regions, the dummy variable indicating any
coverage by insurance appears to be a significantly positive contributor to the pro-rich
distribution of care utilisation in the range [0.0004; 0.0152; p < 0.05]. However, the
extent to which differences in insurance coverage by income contributes to inequity
appears to vary significantly by the levels of care, but not between the two regions: they
appear to be relatively a lot more important in the case of tertiary-care [7% of the HI]
compared to secondary-care [circa 3% and 2% of the HI for inpatient and outpatient,
respectively], whereas they appear to be less important contributor for primary-care [1%
of the HI]. Yet, in the latter case, the pro-rich contribution of insurance appears only
significant [at p < 0.05] in the case of WB, but not GS.
The partial contributions of activity status and marital status to the measured
degree of inequity are generally more important than the insurance coverage per se.
However, once again, some variations in the extent to which these two factors drive
inequity in the utilisation of the three levels of care emerge: the relative contributions of
activity and marital status are larger and significant [at p < 0.05] for the case of primarycare
[circa 7% of the HI] and secondary-inpatient care [circa 5% and 4% for activity
status and marital status, respectively] compared to secondary-outpatient [circa 2% of the
HI, and both are only significant in the case WB at p < 0.05], whereas they appear to be
trivial for tertiary-care [less than 0.5%], with the partial contribution of marital status
being insignificant at p < 0.05. Lastly, the contributions of the dummy variable indicating
(urban) residency appear to play an important role in generating the measured degree of
inequity for the three levels of care and in the two regions. However, the differences in
the relative importance of such factor between the two regions and across the levels of
care are equally noteworthy: while there are some substantial differences between the two
regions – for all levels of care, urban residency in the WB contribute roughly twice as
much as the urban residency in GS – their partial contributions are particularly more
important in the case of tertiary-care [10% and 5% of the HI in the WB and GS,
respectively] and secondary-care [8.4% and 5.2% for outpatient case and 7% and 5% for
inpatient-case in the WB and GS, respectively] compared to primary-care [where they
only constitute about 2.4% and 1.4% of the HI in the WB and GS, respectively], and
appear to be insignificant at p < 0.05 in the case of GS.
To sum up, the (aggregate) contribution to the measured pro-rich inequity, which is
not due income per se constitute about 30% of the total measured inequity (HI) index