The effect of health care expenditures on self-rated health status and the Health Utility Index: Evidence from Canada

Studies of the effect of health care expenditures on health status suggest conflicting evidence of a relationship using data from numerous countries. We use data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey and the Canadian Institute for Health Information to estimate the relationship between per capita provincial health care expenditures and both self-assessed health status and the Health Utility Index. Our sample includes all individuals who were 18 years old or over at the beginning of the survey in 1994. We use random effects ordered probits for self-assessed health status and quantile regressions for the Health Utility Index (HUI). Our results show that provincial health care expenditures have a limited effect on self-rated health status and the HUI. It may be that self-rated health status and the HUI are noisy measures of heath status and as such, combined with the small variation observed in health care expenditure trends over the period, make the magnitude of the relationship between health care expenditures and health difficult to estimate.