The Relationship Between the Health Transformation Program and Health Expenditures: Evidence From an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Testing Approach

Objectives: As health expenditure increases every year, countries try to provide accessible health services to society and try to protect individuals from the expenses they cannot overcome by investigating the reason for this increase. Especially with the arrangements made in the health systems in developing countries such as Turkey, it has been tried to take the control of dramatic increases in health expenditure. Based on this issue, in this study, we aimed to evaluate the effect of income per capita, annual inflation, and health reform called as Health Transformation Program on the health expenditure per capita in Turkey.Methods: This study reflected the effects of income, inflation, and the reform on the total health expenditure through the autoregressive distributed lag. This study covered the years between 1985 and 2016 for Turkey.Results: As a result of this study, there was a positive relationship between health expenditure and income and a negative relationship with the reform (P , .05).Conclusion: According to the results of this study, it is suggested that health expenditures can be kept under control with improvements such as encouraging individuals to use more primary healthcare services than curative health services and increasing the quality of service without compromising the equity in financing.