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...

background : inequality in households’ payments on food and health expenditures presents the accessibility and utili-zation patterns between them. this study investigated the iranian rural and urban households’ inequality in payments on food and out-of-pocket health expenditures from 1998 to 2012. methods : this descriptive study was conducted through the analysis of iranian statistics centre d...

précis this debate article highlights the challenges of health situation in iran and some influencing or relevant factors such as health sector, welfare system and social protection, social exclusion and civil society from the viewpoint of an international partner. some advanced experiences in iranian health system and the manner of system for international cooperation have also been discussed.

In 2003, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. We combine differences-in-differences with matching methods to obtain impact estimates, using data collected from program administrators, health facilities and households. The scheme has increased outpatient and inpatient utilization, and has reduced the cost of deliveries. But it has not reduce...

Kidney transplantation (KT) is only viable renal replacement option for most patients in India. Most patients do not have health insurance and meet treatment expenditure from their own resources. We prospectively evaluated the expenses associated with KT and its impact on the socioeconomic status of families in a public hospital. All direct and indirect expenses incurred by the patients from th...

BACKGROUND There are positive and negative consequences of the implementation of out of pocket (OOP) payments as a source of the healthcare financing. On the one hand, OOP burden increases awareness of treatment costs and limits unnecessary use of healthcare services. On the other hand, it may prevent the sick from accessing needed care. Consequently there are several aspects that ought to be t...

Background Private health insurance is one of the sources of funds for financing health care apart from direct taxes, public insurance and out of pocket payments. Regardless of the choice between a social and private insurance, health insurance ownership has been linked with lower OOP. Thus, health insurance as a type of health care financing, no doubt, will be one of the financing mechanisms i...

BACKGROUND The main goal of this study is to examine the distributions of illness conditions and resulting medical expenditures and their associated factors. To achieve this goal, an in-house survey was conducted in August of 2012 in rural Beijing, the capital city of China. RESULTS The survey was conducted in Nanjianchang and Beijianchang, which are two villages 20 KM away from Miyun, a sate...

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis (TB) patients face substantial delays prior to treatment initiation, and out of pocket (OOP) expenditures often surpass the economic productivity of the household. We evaluated the pre-diagnostic cost and health seeking behaviour of new adult pulmonary TB patients registered at Primary Health Centres (PHCs) in Vellore district, Tamil Nadu, India. METHODS This descripti...