BACKGROUND The catastrophic health expenditure and impoverishment indices offer guidance for developing appropriate health policies and intervention programs to decrease financial inequity. This study assesses socioeconomic inequalities in catastrophic health expenditure and impoverishment in relation to self-reported non-communicable diseases (NCD) in urban Hanoi, Vietnam. METHODS A cross-se...

BACKGROUD This study aimed to measure the poverty head count ratio and poverty gap of rural Yanbian in order to examine whether China's New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme has alleviated its medical impoverishment and to compare the results of this alternative approach with those of a World Bank approach. METHODS This cross-sectional study was based on a stratified random sample survey of 1,...

BACKGROUND Out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenses often lead to catastrophic expenditure and impoverishment in low- and middle-income countries. Yet, there has been no systematic examination of which specific diseases and conditions (e.g., tuberculosis, cardiovascular disease) drive medical impoverishment, defined as OOP direct medical costs pushing households into poverty. METHODS We used a co...

This paper examines the impact of impoverishment on patients' preferences with respect to improving the quality of health care, by focusing on the sudden impoverishment experience that affected the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) since the beginning of the second Palestinian Uprising of September 2000. Two random samples of patients (352 and 353 individuals, respectively) were interviewed ...

BACKGROUND Health expenditure for tuberculosis (TB) care often pushes households into catastrophe and poverty. New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) aims to protect households from catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and impoverishment in rural China. This article assesses the effect of NCMS on relieving CHE and impoverishment from TB care in rural China. METHODS Three hundred fourty-seven ...

Soil barrenness is an important type of land degradation, which seriously restricts the food security and sustainable development agriculture in my country. This paper analyzes status quo soil barrenness, its causes trends, treatment measures, research directions order to serve as a reference for barrenness.

BACKGROUND The goal of universal health coverage (UHC) requires that families who get needed health care do not suffer financial hardship as a result. This can be measured by instances of impoverishment, when a household's consumption including out-of-pocket spending on health is more than the poverty line but its consumption, excluding out-of-pocket spending, is less than the poverty line. Thi...

BACKGROUND The New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS, voluntary health insurance) and the Medical Financial Assistance (MFA, financial relief program) were established in 2003 for rural China. The aim of this study was to document their coverage, assess their effectiveness on access to in-patient care and protection against financial catastrophe and household impoverishment due to health ...