OBJECTIVES Cancer accounts for a major proportion of national health expenditures, which are expected to increase in the future. This paper aims to identify major challenges with estimating cancer related costs, and discuss international comparisons, and recommendations for future research. METHODS It starts from the experience of an international workshop aimed at comparing cancer burden eva...

There is limited information on national health expenditures, services, and outcomes in African countries during the 1990s. We intend to make statistical information available for national level comparisons. National level data were collected from numerous international databases, and supplemented by national household surveys and World Bank expenditure reviews. The results were tabulated and a...

BACKGROUND Many health systems in Africa are funded primarily through out-of-pocket payments. Out-of-pocket payments prevent people from seeking care, can result to catastrophic health spending and lead to impoverishment. This paper estimates the burden of out-of-pocket payments in Kenya; the incidence and intensity of catastrophic health care expenditure and the effect of health spending on na...

Objective The study investigated to compare health care utilization and expenditures between diabetic patients with and without depression in Taiwan. Methods Health care utilization and expenditure among diabetic patients with and without depression disorder during 2000 and 2004 were examined using Taiwan's population-based National Health Insurance claims database. Health care utilization in...

Persons with disabilities use more health care services due to ill health and face higher health care expenses and burden. This study explored the incidence of catastrophic health expenditures of households with persons with disabilities compared to that of those without such persons. We used the Korean Health Panel (KHP) dataset for the years 2010 and 2011. The final sample was 5,610 household...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the level and distribution of household health care expenditures in Morocco, and to compare the level of health care funds provided by households with the levels provided by the government and international donors. In addition, the reliance of poor and non-poor households on both public and private providers was investigated. The study was based on d...

Our estimation strategy uses sequences of conditional probability functions, similar to those used in discrete time hazard rate analyses, to construct a discrete approximation to the density function of an outcome of interest conditional on exogenous explanatory variables. Once the conditional density function has been constructed, we can examine expectations of arbitrary functions of the outco...

Financial protection should be the principal objective of any health system. Commonly used indicators for financial protection are out-of-pocket (OOP) payments as a share of total health expenditure and the amount of households driven into poverty by catastrophic health expenditures (CHEs). In the last decade, OOP health payments consisted of approximately one-fifth of the health finance resour...

Health economists often use log models to deal with skewed outcomes, such as health utilization or health expenditures. The literature provides a number of alternative estimation approaches for log models, including ordinary least-squares on ln(y) and generalized linear models. This study examines how well the alternative estimators behave econometrically in terms of bias and precision when the...

The study examined the linkages between inequality in household expenditure components and total inequality and poverty in Ghana. Using micro data from the sixth round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey conducted in 2012/2013, marginal effects and elasticities were computed for both within-and between-component analysis. The results suggest that, in general, reducing within-component inequali...