Journal of North Khorasan

Background & objectives: Because of its policy implications, investigating the household health care expenditures has become an important issue . the socio-economic status of households along with access to facility, demographic structure and technological progress are factors which examined in terms of importance . 

Materials & Methods:  in order to explore the impact of independant variables, OLS regression technique was implemented on a panel dataset of 24 section and 30 years. The source was the database of statistical center of Iran which were analyzed by two econometrics software named Stata 11 & Eviews 7.

Results: dependant variable had direct relationship with household economic status (household total expenditure and insurance expenditure) and household access to health service (distribution of physician over the household ) in urban and rural area. moreover, the demographic characteristics (proportion of elderly over the household) and technological improvement with healthcare expenditure in urban areas was found to be directly and indirectly related.

Conclusion: Inefficiency of the health insurance system, the poor surveillance over system services and increase in number of elderly had also led to increase in the average cost of household health care expenditure. against the common hypothesis for technology, the estimation results confirm the effects of  technology on decreasing the health care expenditure. actions such as system integration to decrease the cost of services and Increasing the people level of knowledge toward technology specially in rural area is of priority.

Key words: Iran, Health expenditure, Socioeconomic Factors, panel model