Health Care Spending and Hidden Poverty in India

Michael Keane () and Ramna Thakur ()
Additional contact information
Ramna Thakur: Indian Institute of Technology Mandi

No 2018-02, Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales

Abstract: India has a high level of out-of-pocket (OOP) health care spending, and lacks well developed health insurance markets. As a result, official measures of poverty and inequality that treat medical spending symmetrically with consumption goods can be misleading. We argue that OOP medical costs should be treated as necessary expenses for the treatment of illness, not as part of consumption. Adopting this perspective, we construct poverty and inequality measures for India that account for impoverishment induced by OOP medical costs. For 2011/12 we estimate that 4.1% of the population, or 50 million people, are in a state of “hidden poverty” due to medical expenses. Furthermore, while poverty in India fell substantially from 1999/00 to 2011/12, the fraction of the remaining poverty that is due to medical costs has risen substantially. Economic growth appears less “pro-poor” if one accounts for OOP medical costs, especially since 2004/05, and especially in rural areas.

Keywords: Poverty; Consumption; Healthcare; Medical Costs; Inequality; Growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I32 N35 O15 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://research.economics.unsw.edu.au/RePEc/papers/2018-02.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity

Related works:
Journal Article: Health care spending and hidden poverty in India (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:swe:wpaper:2018-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hongyi Li ().