The paper attempts to describe catastrophic health spending and its impact to poverty in the Philippine setting. It focuses on the role of out-of-pocket payments for health care as a springboard in the analysis of measuring the magnitude and analyzing the extent of damage of catastrophic health expenditures. It also explores the scope and trends of these spending by different socioeconomic indi...

This paper investigates the effect of health-related expenditure on household welfare in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo, all of which have undertaken major health sector reform. Two methodologies are used: (i) the incidence and intensity of 'catastrophic' health care expenditure, and (ii) the effect of out-of-pocket payments on poverty headcount and poverty gap m...

There is currently considerable discussion between governments, international agencies, bilateral donors and advocacy groups on whether user fees levied at government health facilities in poor countries should be abolished. It is claimed that this would lead to greater access for the poor and reduce the risks of catastrophic health expenditures if all other factors remained constant, though oth...

BACKGROUND Financial risk protection against the cost of unforeseen healthcare has gained global attention in recent years. Although Ghana implemented a nationwide health insurance scheme with a goal of reducing financial barriers to accessing healthcare and addressing impoverishing effects of out-of-pocket (OOP) healthcare payments, there is a paucity of knowledge on the extent of financial ca...

BACKGROUND As the world's largest developing country, China has entered into the epidemiological phase characterized by high life expectancy and high morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases. Cardiovascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and malignant tumors have become the leading causes of death since the 1990s. Constant payments for maintaining the health status of a ...

BACKGROUND Out of pocket (OOP) health spending can potentially expose households to risk of incurring large medical bills, and this may impact on their welfare. This work investigates the effect of catastrophic OOP on the incidence and depth of poverty in Malawi. METHODS The paper is based on data that was collected from 12,271 households that were interviewed during the third Malawi integrat...

The present paper attempts to modify definition of catastrophic out-of-pocket health expenditure by characterising it based on consumption of necessities. In literature, catastrophic expenditure is defined as that level of OOP health expenditure which exceeds some fixed proportion of household income or household’s capacity to pay. In the present paper, catastrophic health expenditure is define...

BACKGROUND During the last two decades, the trend of out-of-pocket payments (OOP) for health services by Iranian households has been a matter of concern and it has exposed a significant proportion of them to catastrophic and impoverishing health expenditures. OBJECTIVES The current study aimed to investigate three objectives: First, the mean of out-of-pocket payments among Iranian households ...