Volume 26, Number 3 (Summer) 1991
Rosenzweig, Mark R. and T. Paul Schultz. 1991. "Who Receives Medical Care? Income, Implicit Prices, and the Distribution of Medical Services Among Pregnant Women in the United States." Journal of Human Resources 26(3):473-508.
The distribution of medical services among pregnant married women in the United States in 1980 is very unequal. This distribution is examined to assess the predominant effect of tax, transfer, and insurance schemes on the implicit prices of medical services facing women differing by socioeconomic status, healthiness and race. Estimates of the determinants of the probability of receiving four major prenatal medical services are obtained, controlling both for socioeconomic status and for initial health status, as inferred from estimates of health technology determining birthweight. Results reject the hypothesis that medical services are provided only on the basis of medical need or are allocated in a market in which the implicit price of care is invariant to husband's income. The combined effect of taxes and transfers is found to reduce the implicit price paid for these four medical services by rich compared to poor married women in the United States, and thus to encourage their use by higher income (and education) groups.
Mark R. Rosenzweig is a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. T. Paul Schultz is a professor of economics at Yale University. This research was supported in part by grant No. R01 HD20505 from the National Institutes of Health. The authors appreciate the comments of two referees and Michael Grossman, who with Stanley Henshaw provided county and state data at various stages in the project. The programming assistance of Paul McGuire has also made important contributions to this work at many stages. All the data used in this paper are from public sources, including the microdata file from the National Center for health Statistics (1982), while the sources of regional data used as instruments are described in Appendix Table B.
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