Catastrophic Household Expenditure on Health Care in Urban Slums of Cuttack: Focus on Health Sector Reform in Odisha

One of the main challenges in the implementation of health care reform in developing countries of India has been the development of catastrophic household expenditure on health care. This papers aims at contributing to the examination of the content, measurement and policy implications of health care reform tackling catastrophic risks in one of the oldest city of Odisha that is Cuttack. We undertake a theoretical and empirical analysis on the magnitude of catastrophic expenditures drawing upon data from Cuttack and we used descriptive statistics and regression analysis along with SPSS for analysis. Our empirical analysis indicates that how much are households currently spending on health care and the role of socio-economic status of households on health care expenditure and their percentage of their income is spent on it whether is it catastrophic or not? Materials and Methods: Three slums with a total a population of 6000 were selected for this study. Households where there is history of illness in last one month were included in the study. Results: There were a total of 218 episodes of illness in the households. The household’s belonging to socioeconomic class A and B had higher spending on individual’s illness per episode as compared to households of socioeconomic class C, D, and E. Socioeconomic status was the key determinant of health care expenditure. Conclusion: In this study, it has been found that almost all the households suffered from catastrophic health expenditure.