Barriers to Access in the Provision of Health Services in Colombia: Characteristics of the Affected Population

Abstract

The study analyzes the barriers to access to public health services and their impact on the Colombian population 2020-2021. The literature recognizes that limited access to health services is a recurrent problem in lower-middle income countries. Information from the National Data Archive is used, developing robust probit and multinomial logit models to evaluate the impact of people's access to hospital services, as well as a cluster model to characterize the target population. The results show that the variables total household income, sex, age, social security regime and quality of service are statistically significant, with the ethnicity variable being insignificant. As a novelty, the inclusion of variables such as social security regime, ethnicity and household income as determinant and significant variables allows us to identify the characteristics of the patients and the barriers to access to health services in Colombia, making it possible to propose public policy guidelines.