OBJECTIVE The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act required health plans to provide mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD) benefits on par with medical benefits beginning in 2010. Previous research found that parity significantly lowered average out-of-pocket (OOP) spending on MH/SUD treatment of children. No evidence is available on how pari...

In this paper we explore the potential of future health services administrative data systems to improve the measurement of poverty. We first discuss the current and proposed new methods of measuring poverty, focusing on the need and the difficulty in capturing out-of-pocket medical (OOP) costs in the context of a survey focused on economic issues. We then discuss a current data collection effor...

We estimate the distributional incidence of health care financing in 13 Asian territories that account for 55% of the Asian population. In all territories, higher-income households contribute more to the financing of health care. The better-off contribute more as a proportion of ability to pay in most low- and lower-middle-income territories. Health care financing is slightly regressive in thre...

Background Access to appropriate and affordable healthcare is needed to achieve better health outcomes in Africa. However, access to healthcare remains low, especially among the poor. In Zambia, poor access exists despite the policy by the government to remove user fees in all primary healthcare facilities in the public sector. The paper has two main objectives: (i) to examine the factors assoc...

according to importance of cirrhosis of the liver and the lack of information about the economic burden of the disease, we performed this study to estimate the economic burden of liver cirrhosis in iran in 2011.the cost-of-illness method, based on the human capital theory, has been used. both direct and indirect costs have been estimated using a prevalence approach and bottom-up method. the inp...

Since 1942, Canada’s Income Tax Act has provided tax relief to taxpayers who spend substantial amounts of their income on out-of-pocket medical expenses. Since 1988, this relief comes in the form of a tax credit, an amount that is directly deductible against income tax payable. Not all medical expenses are eligible. In particular, the statutory scheme excludes some, but not all, medical service...

Janet is a 67-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer. Despite having insurance, Janet has been saddled with life-altering out-of-pocket expenses from her cancer treatment. In Part I of this two-part series, we described how Janet’s struggle with out-of-pocket expenses was not unique; a growing body of evidence has detailed the negative impact of costs on insured patients receiving cancer ...

Introduction In India, health care is provided by a mix of government and private providers. While the government health services are ostensibly free, in reality, studies have shown that people have to pay for medicines, diagnostics and other procedures. People approaching the private sector usually end up making out-of-pocket payments (OOP). This has two effectsit can be a substantial and ineq...

Globally, road traffic injuries accounted for about 1.36 million deaths in 2015 and are projected to become the fourth leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost by 2030. One-fifth of these deaths occurred in South Asia where road traffic injuries are projected to increase by 144% by 2020. Despite this rapidly increasing disease burden there is limited evidence on the economic...