 Financial protection in health revisited: Is catastrophic health spending underestimated for service‐ or disease‐specific analysis?John E. Ataguba, Hyacinth E. Ichoku, Marie‐Gloriose Ingabire and James Akazili Health Economics, 2024, vol. 33, issue 6, 1229-1240 Abstract: Economists originally developed methods to assess financial catastrophe using total or aggregate out‐of‐pocket health spending. Aggregate out‐of‐pocket health spending is financially catastrophic when it exceeds a fixed proportion (i.e., threshold) of a household's total income or expenditure in a given period. However, these methods are now applied to assess financial catastrophe in disease‐ or service‐specific rather than aggregate out‐of‐pocket health spending without using disease‐ or service‐specific thresholds. This paper argues that not using disease‐ or service‐specific thresholds for such assessments is misleading and underestimates the burden of financial catastrophe, especially among households from poorer backgrounds. It then proposed disease‐ or service‐specific catastrophic payment thresholds, applied them to Nigeria and found that financial catastrophe was underestimated for the five service groups considered. The paper stresses the importance of using disease‐ or service‐specific thresholds and avoiding unadjusted thresholds, which may leave poorer households behind as financially protected. Date: 2024 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:hlthec:v:33:y:2024:i:6:p:1229-1240 Access Statistics for this article Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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