Background Cardiovascular disease poses a great financial risk on households in countries without universal health coverage like Ethiopia. This paper aims to estimate the magnitude and intensity of catastrophic health expenditure and factors associated with catastrophic health expenditure for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease in general and specialised cardiac hospitals in Addi...

INTRODUCTION It is well-known that the prevalence of chronic diseases is high among older people, especially those who are poor. Moreover, chronic diseases can result in catastrophic health expenditure. The relationship between chronic diseases and their financial burden on households is thus double-sided, as financial difficulties can give rise to, and result from, chronic diseases. Our aim wa...

BACKGROUND This study investigated the household economic burden of eating disorders and cost-related non-adherence to treatment in Australia. METHODS Multi-centre prospective observational study using a structured questionnaire. Ninety participants were recruited from two clinic settings in New South Wales, Australia and from the community using social media. The primary outcome measures wer...

OBJECTIVE To investigate changes in the expenditure of giving birth in health-care facilities in rural China during 1998-2007, to examine the financial burden on households, particularly poor ones, and to identify factors associated with out-of-pocket expenditure. METHODS Cross-sectional data on births between 1998 and 2007 were obtained from national household surveys conducted in 2003 and 2...

Most countries are using some kinds of pharmaceutical policies, like external reference-based pricing, to control the costs of medicines. This policy could be implemented in different ways and there is no systematic method for selecting reference countries. In this study, we tried to identify and classify the factors affecting the selection of reference countries in Iran. Delphi method was empl...

Health care finance in developing and low income countries is still predominantly based on out-of-pocket (OOP) payments, and the lack of prepayment mechanisms like insurance. In the absence of insurance, an illness not only reduces welfare directly, it also increases the risk of impoverishment due to high treatment expenditures. It is now widely acknowledged that health care expenditures can dr...

BACKGROUND Physical therapy decreases low back pain, improves function, and may lead to decreased use of medical services. However, factors predicting physical therapy utilization for patients with low back pain are not well understood. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to identify the impact of out-of-pocket expenditure on physical therapy utilization for US adults with nonspecific lo...

Health financing has been considered as an important building block of a health system and has a key role in promoting universal health coverage in the Vietnam. This paper aims to describe the pattern of health expenditure, including total health expenditure and composition of health expenditure, over the last two decades in Vietnam. The paper mainly uses the data from Vietnam National Health A...

This study explored catastrophic health expenditure in China, due to out-of-pocket payments for dental care, and its associated individual- and contextual-level factors. We pooled data from 31,566 adults who participated in the third National Oral Health Survey with province-level data from different sources. We defined catastrophic dental health expenditure (CDHE) as payments for dental servic...

BACKGROUND Generation of resources for providing health care services is an important issue in developing countries. User charges in the form of Surgical Package Program (SPP) were introduced in all district hospitals of Haryana to address this problem. We evaluate the effect of this SPP program on surgical care utilization and out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditures. METHODS Data on 25437 surgeries...