This paper presents and compares two threshold approaches to measuring the fairness of health care payments, one requiring that payments do not exceed a pre-specified proportion of pre-payment income, the other that they do not drive households into poverty. We develop indices for 'catastrophe' that capture the intensity of catastrophe as well as its incidence and also allow the analyst to capt...

BACKGROUND Inequality in households' payments on food and health expenditures presents the accessibility and utilization patterns between them. This study investigated the Iranian rural and urban households' inequality in payments on food and Out-of-Pocket health expenditures from 1998 to 2012. METHODS This descriptive study was conducted through the analysis of Iranian Statistics Centre data...

BACKGROUND Out-of-pocket payments can have a large impact on the demand for healthcare. They can be essential not only to decrease unnecessary service use, but also to encourage the use of particular preventive services provided free of charge or at a lower price. Moreover, out-of-pocket payments may increase the costs of unhealthy behaviour and provide incentives for a healthier lifestyle. M...

BACKGROUND Health inequality monitoring especially in Health care financing field is very important. Hence, this study tends to assess the inequality in household's capacity to pay and out-of-pocket health carepaymentsin Tehran metropolis. METHODS This cross-sectional study was performed in 2013.Thestudy population was selected by stratified cluster sampling, and they constitute the typical h...

SUMMARY BACKGROUND The Government of Ghana's fee exemption policy for delivery care introduced in September 2003, aimed at reducing financial barriers to using maternal services. This policy also aimed to increase the rate of skilled attendance at delivery, reduce maternal and perinatal mortality rates and contribute to reducing poverty. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the economic outcomes of the poli...

This paper compares egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay or ATP) and minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments do not exceed a pre-specified proportion of pre-payment income, or do not drive households into poverty). We develop indices for both sets of approaches. In the first, we compare the “agnostic” approac...

Protecting households from high out-of-pocket (OOP) payments for health care is an important health system goal. High OOP payments can push households into poverty and make them vulnerable to catastrophic health expenditures. This study, based in India, aims to: (a) estimate OOP payments for health and related impoverishment across economic groups; (b) decompose OOP payments and relate the cont...