Chapter 2

CEIS Health Report 2006
tures. Besides, our data demonstrates that dental care also plays an important role for
households that can afford it (namely households in the second standardized consumption
quintile).
We can formulate the same argument for long-term care (LTC).
Table 8 shows the out of pocket health expenditure composition for households subject
to catastrophic expenditures. It can give some information about the consumption behaviour
of those households (which are forced or freely choose) to use a great part of their
resources for healthcare. Analysis has to take into consideration consumption standardized
quintiles.
The largest part of the expenditures (households in 3rd quintile) refer to dental care
(28,9%), LTC (26,7%) and drugs (23,6%). A similar observation can be made for the 4th
and 5th quintiles: the only difference is that dental care assumes a leading role.
Table 8 – Composition of out of pocket health expenditures
by standardized consumption quintiles – Cata households – Italy 2004
Quintile 1 2 3 4 5
Hospital 0,3% 0,9% 0,7% 4,9% 9,4%
Specialist care 12,8% 16,8% 6,7% 3,7% 2,2%
Dental care 7,2% 16,8% 28,9% 43,4% 57,9%
Analysis 6,3% 6,7% 5% 3,9% 0,5%
Apparatus and prothesis 5,3% 9,1% 8,3% 4% 7,4%
Thermal care 0,0% 0,1% 0,0% 0,7% 2,2%
Pharmaceutical treatment 61,9% 32,5% 23,6% 8,3% 4,3%
Disability and auxiliary services 6,1% 17% 26,7% 31% 16,0%
Source: Our elaboration ISTAT data
4.1.6 Regional distribution of impoverishment and catastrophic payments
Neither impoverishment nor catastrophic payments are uniformly distributed over the
entire territory (Table 9).
Southern Regions have a higher incidence of both poverty and impoverishment: since
poor households are not included into impoverishment analysis, we may conclude that
the inefficacy of the National Health Scheme in protecting households from economic
risk related to illnesses, contribute to the increase of actual household poverty (obtained
by summing poor and impoor) and consequently to an increase of the inequality between
northern and southern Regions.
Most of the northern Regions have an impoverishment incidence that is lower than the
italian average. The only exception is Liguria, where population income over the average,
is not sufficient to overcome the effect of the greater amount of elderly people, thus
confirming the higher risk for elderly people.
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