Redistributive effects of Swedish health care finance

This paper investigates the redistributive effects of the Swedish health ca re financing system in 1980 and 1990 for four different financial sources: county council taxes, payroll taxes, direct payments and state grants. The redistributive effects are decomposed into vertical, horizontal and 'rerank ing' segments for each of the four financial sources. The data used are bas ed on probability samples of the Swedish population, from the Level of Livi ng Survey (LNU) from 1981 and 1991. The paper concludes that the Swedish he alth care financing system is weakly progressive, although direct payments are regressive. There is some horizontal inequity and 'reranking', which ma inly comes from the county council taxes, since those tax rates vary for ea ch county council. The implication is that, to some extent, people with equ al incomes are treated unequally. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.