BACKGROUND Nepal has committed to the global community to achieve universal health coverage by 2030. Nevertheless, Nepal still has a high proportion of out-of-pocket health payment and a limited risk-pooling mechanism. Out-of-pocket payment for the healthcare services could result in catastrophic health expenditure (CHE). Evidence is required to effectively channel the efforts to lower those ex...

BACKGROUND In Kenya, where 60 to 80% of the urban residents live in informal settlements (frequently referred to as slums), out-of-pocket (OOP) payments account for more than a third of national health expenditures. However, little is known on the extent to which these OOP payments are associated with personal or household financial catastrophe in the slums. This paper seeks to examine the inci...

BACKGROUND In Togo, about half of health care costs are paid at the point of service, which reduces access to health care and exposes households to catastrophic health expenditure (CHE). To address this situation, the Togolese government introduced a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in 2011. This insurance currently covers only employees and retirees of the State as well as their depende...

OBJECTIVE To assess the comparability of out-of-pocket (OOP) payment and catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) estimates from different household surveys in India. METHODS Data on CHE, outpatient and inpatient OOP payments and other expenditure from all major national or multi-state surveys since 2000 were compared. These included two consumer expenditure surveys (the National Sample Survey f...

This paper was aimed to investigate the mixed empirical results on the effect of health insurance in reducing the risk of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE). We investigated a wide range of factors affecting the risk of CHE among patients admitted to hospitals in Tehran. We categorized hospitals into five groups from private hospitals to charity ones. The data used herein was extracted from ...

BACKGROUND Setting Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals for health has largely focused on defining specific targets of mortality and morbidity reduction over given time periods. Yet, less attention has been devoted to setting targets for the systemic determinants of health delivery, such as access and financial risk protection (FRP)-prevention of medical impoverishment...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the effect of "Seguro Popular" (SP) on the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure in the medium term. MATERIAL AND METHODS We used the 'Encuesta de Evaluación del SP' --SP Survey Evaluation-- (2005-2008). We analyzed the SP effect on the rural cohort during two years of follow-up (2006 and 2008) and in the urban coho...

OBJECTIVES The prevalence of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) within low-income and middle-income countries has reached epidemic proportions. However, the association between out-of-pocket (OOP) payment and socioeconomic status (SES) of patients with CVD is not well studied. We aimed to understand the financial burden among Chinese middle-aged and older patients with CVD, and whether there was an ...