Background: Families are willing to spend their entire lives improving their children due to emotional attachments, which, in turn, increases their exposure to catastrophic health expenditures (CHEs). The present study aimed to estimate the level of exposure to CHEs and its determinants among households with pediatric cancer and oncology disorders. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional s...

Spending on health insurance represents an important share of private expenditure on health in Brazil. The study aimed to describe the evolution of spending on private health insurance plans of Brazilian families, according to their income. Data from the Family Budget Surveys (POF) 2002-2003 and 2008-2009 were used. To compare the spending figures among the surveys, the Consumer Price Index (IP...

BACKGROUND Unequal geographical distribution of medical care resources and insufficient healthcare coverage have been two long-standing problems with Taiwan's public health system. The implementation of National Health Insurance (NHI) attempted to mitigate the inequality in health care use. This study examines the degree to which Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) has reduced out-of-pocke...

INTRODUCTION Alcohol use and alcohol-related problems are on the rise in low- and middle-income countries. Expenditure on alcohol is an important problem for families and communities and needs to be assessed. AIM This study examines level of alcohol consumption and expenditure on alcohol in a district in Vietnam. METHODS A cross-sectional survey was conducted in a rural district in northern...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES To examine the household economic impact of an outbreak of chikungunya in terms of out-of-pocket health care expenditure and income foregone due to loss of productive time in Orissa, India. METHODS Structured interviews were conducted on 150 respondents, bread winners from the affected households of a village with maximum number of reported cases in the state, during A...

OBJECTIVE To investigate changes in the expenditure of giving birth in health-care facilities in rural China during 1998-2007, to examine the financial burden on households, particularly poor ones, and to identify factors associated with out-of-pocket expenditure. METHODS Cross-sectional data on births between 1998 and 2007 were obtained from national household surveys conducted in 2003 and 2...

The concept of risk aversion is important in understanding individual behavior as well as many other theoretical issues in finance and economics. This study uses life insurance expenditure data of Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (SFIE) in Taiwan to estimate the Arrow-Pratt risk aversion coefficient of households empirically by using the reduced form equation derived by Halek and Eisenha...

Ill health is very expensive and could have significant impact on household consumptions. The purpose of this study is to examine the differences in household consumption patterns among households with or without ill health family member(s) in rural China. We also examine the opportunity cost of ill health by estimating the marginal effects of medical spending on consumption patterns. The data ...