Socio-Economic Inequalities in Health - Measurement Problems and the Results of Analyses for Poland

Population health status has improved in the EU in the recent years, but health inequalities continue to be considerable, both within individual Member States and among them. Reducing human potential, the inequalities seriously burden the Member States and their health care systems. Policies aimed at removing the inequalities could help increase productivity, constrained by diseases and premature mortality. The article presents the results of an empirical investigation into the magnitude of the socio-economic health inequality in Poland. The inequality was measured with the health concentration index indicating the inequality of health status distribution caused by economic status. A valuable property of the health concentration index is that it can be decomposed, thus allowing the identification of the sources of the inequality. The investigation took account of the fact that gender causes variations in the values of health indicators.