The Determinants of Medicine Use in Romania

Abstract

For Romania's population, the highest share of total health services use corresponds to the use of pharmaceutical services, for which the state covers less than 60% of health expenditure. This leads people to use their financial resources to cover their health needs, which creates further disparities in the use of medicines. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to study the impact of socio-economic, health and health behaviour factors on the use of prescribed and self-prescribed medicines using probit models. This analysis is based on data from the European Health Interview Survey 2014 (EHIS 2014) and is explored at the whole population level and separately for two age groups (less than 65 years, 65 years and over). Overall, the empirical findings highlight that the determinants of pharmaceutical consumption differ by type of medicines and age group.