Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Health is a convoluted conceptualisation that encompasses myriad dimensions, each of which is feasible to describe and quantify in terms of the extent of inequalities. Such aspects include perceptions of ill-health, care and treatment seeking behaviour, the incidence of disease, disability, and death and socio-economic consequences of seeking healthcare. There exists rich literature that has emphasised the utilisation divide in Indian context across socio-economic stratefiers like income, age, sex and education. The present study features another aspect of healthcare, i.e., forgone care. The study is an attempt to shed light on the changing patterns of forgone health care among elderly in India in last two decades, i.e., between 1995 and 2014. The paper employs the unit level records from national sample survey’s health and morbidity rounds for three years - 1995-96, 2004 and 2014. Apart from basic bivariate tabulations, the present analysis relies on the use of Andersen-Newman model of healthcare utilisation to study the role of predisposing, economic, and health need characteristics in determining the extent of forgone care among the greying population in India. Further, to investigate the degree of inequity as explained by the socio-economic determinants, concentration index decomposition technique is used. The study finds that the forgone gone care increased between 1995 and 2004 while in the last decade it has dipped. However, substantive disparity along the lines of wealth, gender, and human capital is found to be quite pronounced in the present study.