Custos de internação no Nordeste e Sudeste em 1998: análise do efeito estrutura etária, freqüência de internações e estrutura de custos

Introduction: The aging of the Brazilian population brings out the question about rising health expenditures, which are dependent not only on the age structure, but also on the expenditure distribution by age, which, on its turn, is related to the epidemiological profile by age and on the medical procedures. Objective: To analyze the influence of age structure, hospitalization frequency and expenditure structure in health expenditures, for men and women in Northeast and Southeast Regions, in 1998. Methods: The population size was standardizaded and, assuming a population of 10 million people for each sex, the difference in the expenditure, by Region, was compared, fixing each component at a time. A decomposition exercise was done in order to identify the proportion of the difference explained by each component. Results: The expenditure structure, in both sexes, was the component that explained the most, which means that if the expenditure structure difference were eliminated, the total expenditure's differences between the regions would decrease from 32,6% to -0,39% for men and from 6,8% to -27,27% for women.