Inequality of opportunity in outpatient expenditure among the elderly with multimorbidity: evidence from China

BACKGROUND: Inequality of opportunity (IOp) stemming from social circumstances exists in outpatient service utilization for the multimorbid elderly in China. However, little is known regarding the magnitude of the IOp and its composition. Therefore, this study aims to measure the IOp in outpatient expenditure and provide potential pathways for policy reform by assessing the contribution of each circumstance. METHODS: This study included 3527 elderly aged ≥ 65 years with multimorbidity from the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Study conducted in 2017–2018. An ordinary least squares regression model was used to analyze the circumstance-influencing factors of outpatient expenditure. The parametric approach was performed to quantify the IOp in outpatient expenditure and the Shapley value decomposition method was employed to determine the contribution of each circumstance. By extracting heterogeneity in the residual of the circumstance-dependent equation of outpatient expenditure across circumstance groups divided based on cluster analysis, we captured the effect of unobserved circumstances. RESULTS: Except for pension and distance to health facilities, all the associations between circumstance and outpatient expenditure were statistically significant. The inequality caused by circumstances accounted for 25.18% of the total inequality. The decomposition results revealed that the reimbursement rate contributed 82.92% of the IOp, followed by education duration (4.55%), household registration (3.21%), household income (3.18%), pension (1.49%), medical insurance (1.26%), physical labor (0.99%), unobserved circumstances (0.86%), distance to health facilities (0.83%) and region (0.71%). CONCLUSIONS: The priority of policy enhancement is to effectively improve the outpatient reimbursement benefit for treating chronic diseases. Additional crucial actions include enhancing the health literacy of the multimorbid elderly to promote the shift from medical needs to demands and accelerating the construction of rural capacity for providing high-quality healthcare to the elderly with multimorbidity. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12939-023-01953-z.