Economic Class and Access to Physician Services under Public Medical Care Insurance

Abstract

The dynamic effects of public medical care insurance on access to physician services are examined in this paper. A special definition of access is employed where access is measured as the inverse of the proportion of families of a given economic class who have not used physician services in a given year. Data are presented for the period 1963 through 1968 for a large sample of families in the Province of Saskatchewan in Canada. The evidence suggests that low-income classes have less contact with physicians than high-income classes. This disparity in accessibility is reduced, but not removed, as experience with Medicare increases. It is concluded that public medical care insurance does result in increased relative accessibility to physicians for the low-income classes.