BACKGROUND To promote skilled attendance at births and reduce maternal deaths, the government of Ghana introduced the free maternal care policy under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in 2008. The objective is to eliminate financial barriers associated with the use of services. But studies elsewhere showed that out of pocket (OOP) payments still exist in the midst of fee exemptions. T...

Background There is high reliance on out-of-pocket (OOP) health payments as a means of financing health system in Nigeria. OOP health payments can make households face catastrophe and become impoverished. The study aims to examine the financial burden of OOP health payments among households in Nigeria.   Methods Secondary data from the Harmonized Nigeria Living Standard Survey (HNLSS) of 2009/2...

BACKGROUND Health inequity is an important issue all around the world. The Chinese basic medical security system comprises three major insurance schemes, namely the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI), the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI), and the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS). Little research has been conducted to look into the disparity in payments among the h...

Out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditures for healthcare continue to be the most significant means of healthcare issue in the developing world and constitute a large share of their living financial plan (1, 2). The healthcare expenditures are largely unpredictable and usually have a negative impact on the poor households, while large expenditures have catastrophic impacts on household welfare. A sudden ...

BACKGROUND More than 72% of health expenditure in India is financed by individual households at the time of illness through out-of-pocket payments. This is a highly regressive way of financing health care and sometimes leads to impoverishment. Health insurance is recommended as a measure to protect households from such catastrophic health expenditure (CHE). We studied two Indian community healt...

medicines constitute a substantial proportion of out-of-pocket (oop) expenses in indian households. in order to address this issue, the government of india launched the jan aushadhi (medicine for the masses) scheme (jas) to provide cheap generic medicines to the patients (http://janaushadhi.gov.in/about_jan_aushadhi.html). these medicines are provided through the jan aushadhi stores established...

The southern state of Kerala, India was seriously affected by a chikungunya epidemic in 2007. As this outbreak was the first of its kind, the morbidity incurred by the epidemic was a challenge to the state's public health system. A cross sectional survey was conducted in five districts of Kerala that were seriously affected by the epidemic, using a two-stage cluster sampling technique to select...

OBJECTIVE High out-of-pocket (OOP) costs can be an obstacle to health care access and treatment compliance. This study investigated trends in high OOP health care burden in people with diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Using Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 2001-2011 data, we examined trends in the proportion of people aged 18-64 years with diabetes facing a high OOP burden. We also exami...