New measure of catastrophic health expenditures with application on rural Egypt
Suzan Abdel-Rahman and
Mohamed Abonazel
Middle East Development Journal, 2021, vol. 13, issue 2, 292-317
Abstract:
Reducing Out-of-pocket (OOP) health payments is an essential element to protect households from financial risks and eradicate extreme poverty. This paper aimed to provide a new approach for measuring catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) by redefining subsistence spending to comprise the minimum acceptable level of all necessities. The new approach defined OOP health expenditures as catastrophic payments if they undermine a household’s ability to maintain essential needs that are not limited to food needs as assumed by the Capacity to pay (CTP) approach. The equivalence scale is estimated to reflect the dominant consumption patterns and the Cost of Basic Need Approach (CBN) is employed to measure the subsistence spending. We estimated the burden of OOP health payment on household living standards in rural Egypt using data from Household Income, Expenditure, and Consumption Survey in 2015. Rural areas exhibited a considerable incidence of catastrophic payments. Redefining subsistence spending better detected the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure among poor households. The distribution of CHE became highly regressive and demonstrated that catastrophic payments are more concentrated among poor households. Although poor households have incurred relatively small health payments compared to wealthy ones, this has threatened their standard of living. The highest incidence rates of CHE were also observed among uneducated, unemployed, female, elderly heads, among households with chronically ill members, and those who experienced outpatient services. The poor performance of the health insurance system in protecting vulnerable groups from catastrophic payments creates a critical need to redesign its policies and improve its service quality.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17938120.2021.1958560 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
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:taf:rmdjxx:v:13:y:2021:i:2:p:292-317
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmdj20
DOI: 10.1080/17938120.2021.1958560
Access Statistics for this article
Middle East Development Journal is currently edited by Raimundo Soto
More articles in Middle East Development Journal from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst (chris.longhurst@tandf.co.uk).