Measuring Financial Protection in Health

Measuring Financial Protection in Health PDF Author: Adam Wagstaff
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Chemotherapy
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Abstract: Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households, especially poor ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it makes the difference between a household being above and below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents empirical work in the area of financial protection in health, including the impacts of government policy. The paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to measure financial protection.

Measuring Financial Protection in Health

Measuring Financial Protection in Health PDF Author: Adam Wagstaff
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Chemotherapy
Languages : en
Pages : 34

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abstract: Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households, especially poor ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it makes the difference between a household being above and below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents empirical work in the area of financial protection in health, including the impacts of government policy. The paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to measure financial protection.

Measuring Financial Protection in Health

Measuring Financial Protection in Health PDF Author: Adam Wagstaff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households, especially poor ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it makes the difference between a household being above and below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents empirical work in the area of financial protection in health, including the impacts of government policy. The paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to measure financial protection.

Health Equity and Financial Protection

Health Equity and Financial Protection PDF Author:
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821387960
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Two key policy goals in the health sector are equity and financial protection. New methods, data and powerful computers have led to a surge of interest in quantitative analysis that permits monitoring progress toward these objectives, and comparisons across countries. ADePT is a new computer program that streamlines and automates such work, ensuring that results are genuinely comparable and allowing them to be produced with a minimum of programming skills. This book provides a step-by-step guide to the use of ADePT for quantitative analysis of equity and financial protection in the health sect

CATA Meets IMPOV

CATA Meets IMPOV PDF Author: Adam Wagstaff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 41

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Book Description
Up to now catastrophic and impoverishing payments have been seen as two alternative approaches to measuring financial protection in health. Building on the previous literature, the authors propose a unified methodology in which impoverishing and catastrophic payments are mutually exclusive outcomes. They achieve this by expressing out-of-pocket payments as a ratio of' discretionary' consumption, defined as the amount by which total consumption (gross of out-of-pocket payments) exceeds the poverty line. This allows the authors to identify both households who are impoverished by out-of-pocket payments (their ratio exceeds one) and households who are pushed even further into poverty by out-of-pocket payments (their ratio is negative); the authors call such payments' immiserizing'. Households experiencing' catastrophic' payments are a subset of those who incur out-of-pocket payments but who are neither impoverished nor immiserized by them. Two alternative definitions of catastrophic payments are offered: those that absorb more than a pre-specified fraction of discretionary consumption; and those that leave a household's nonmedical consumption (total consumption net of out-of-pocket spending) below a pre-specified multiple of the poverty line. The authors also offer a simple financial protection index that reflects the percentages of households incurring immiserizing, impoverishing, catastrophic, non-catastrophic, and zero out-of-pocket payments. They illustrate their unified approach with data from the World Health Survey, using international poverty lines and a catastrophic payment threshold of 40 percent.

Coverage Matters

Coverage Matters PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309076099
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Roughly 40 million Americans have no health insurance, private or public, and the number has grown steadily over the past 25 years. Who are these children, women, and men, and why do they lack coverage for essential health care services? How does the system of insurance coverage in the U.S. operate, and where does it fail? The first of six Institute of Medicine reports that will examine in detail the consequences of having a large uninsured population, Coverage Matters: Insurance and Health Care, explores the myths and realities of who is uninsured, identifies social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the situation, and describes the likelihood faced by members of various population groups of being uninsured. It serves as a guide to a broad range of issues related to the lack of insurance coverage in America and provides background data of use to policy makers and health services researchers.

Medical Care Economic Risk

Medical Care Economic Risk PDF Author: Panel on Measuring Medical Care Risk in Conjunction with the New Supplemental Income Poverty Measure
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030926605X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The United States has seen major advances in medical care during the past decades, but access to care at an affordable cost is not universal. Many Americans lack health care insurance of any kind, and many others with insurance are nonetheless exposed to financial risk because of high premiums, deductibles, co-pays, limits on insurance payments, and uncovered services. One might expect that the U.S. poverty measure would capture these financial effects and trends in them over time. Yet the current official poverty measure developed in the early 1960s does not take into account significant increases and variations in medical care costs, insurance coverage, out-of-pocket spending, and the financial burden imposed on families and individuals. Although medical costs consume a growing share of family and national income and studies regularly document high rates of medical financial stress and debt, the current poverty measure does not capture the consequences for families' economic security or their income available for other basic needs. In 1995, a panel of the National Research Council (NRC) recommended a new poverty measure, which compares families' disposable income to poverty thresholds based on current spending for food, clothing, shelter, utilities, and a little more. The panel's recommendations stimulated extensive collaborative research involving several government agencies on experimental poverty measures that led to a new research Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which the U.S. Census Bureau first published in November 2011 and will update annually. Analyses of the effects of including and excluding certain factors from the new SPM showed that, were it not for the cost that families incurred for premiums and other medical expenses not covered by health insurance, 10 million fewer people would have been poor according to the SPM. The implementation of the patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a strong impetus to think rigorously about ways to measure medical care economic burden and risk, which is the basis for Medical Care Economic Risk. As new policies - whether part of the ACA or other policies - are implemented that seek to expand and improve health insurance coverage and to protect against the high costs of medical care relative to income, such measures will be important to assess the effects of policy changes in both the short and long term on the extent of financial burden and risk for the population, which are explained in this report.

An Alternative Framework for Analyzing Financial Protection in Health

An Alternative Framework for Analyzing Financial Protection in Health PDF Author: Jennifer Prah Ruger
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A greater focus on the role of health systems in health, development, and economic growth has led health policy research and analysis, domestic and global, to scrutinize health financing, insurance, and financial protection. Two World Health Reports (2000 and 2010) have called for evaluating health system performance in terms of health financing, and the World Health Organization's (WHO) 64th World Health Assembly reiterated the need for sustainable health financing and universal coverage worldwide. With this increased focus has come closer examination of conventional frameworks and measures of financial protection in health both from academic and policy circles. Consensus had developed among academic and policy analysts on two primary metrics, catastrophic and impoverishing spending, for financial protection. Both methods use as a measure the percentage of out-of-pocket health spending in households' overall spending. They differ in the way medical spending is deemed problematic: catastrophic spending is above a threshold percentage, while impoverishing spending pushes a household below the poverty line. Both metrics are helpful indicators of the absolute and relative level of household out-of-pocket health care spending and have been employed in multiple studies worldwide. Our research group conducted a study focusing on a modification of these metrics -- the out-of-pocket spending burden ratio using household equivalent income derived from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Equivalence Scale. But the consensus has given way, and critiques of the conventional approach now run wide and deep. Critics include those who are most invested and who have employed these methodologies, and those who argue that estimates of household health expenditures themselves are subject to considerable variability depending on survey design. This article proposes a multidimensional financial protection profile that offers a more holistic view of health spending, one that goes beyond the level of spending to cover aspects directly related to health care, such as health care access and insurance utilization, and examines broader impacts on current and longer-term household consumption. This multidimensional approach aims to help policy makers understand the larger context of household health spending and make health and social policy adjustments to mitigate damaging effects.

The Economic Consequences of Health Shocks

The Economic Consequences of Health Shocks PDF Author: Adam Wagstaff
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Medical care, Cost of
Languages : en
Pages : 21

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Book Description
Abstract: "While there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence on the economic effects of adverse health shocks, there is relatively little hard empirical evidence. The author builds on recent empirical work to explore in the context of postreform Vietnam two related issues: (1) how far household income and medical care spending responds to health shocks, and (2) how far household consumption is protected against health shocks. The results suggest that adverse health shocks - captured by negative changes in body mass index (BMI) - are associated with reductions in earned income. This appears to be only partly - if at all - due to a reverse feedback from income changes to BMI changes. By contrast, there is a hint - the relevant coefficient is not significant - that adverse BMI shocks may result in increases in unearned income. This may reflect additional gifts, remittances, and so on, from family and friends following the health shock. Medical spending is found to increase following an adverse health shock, but not among those with health insurance. The impact for the uninsured is large, equal in absolute size to the income loss associated with a BMI shock. The lack of impact for the insured points to complete insurance against the medical care costs associated with health shocks, and is consistent with the very generous coverage of Vietnam's health insurance program in this period. The question arises: have Vietnamese households been able to hold their food and nonfood consumption constant in the face of these income reductions and extra medical care outlays? The results suggest not. For the sample as a whole, both food and nonfood consumption are found to be responsive to health shocks, indicating an inability to smooth nonmedical consumption in the face of health shocks. Further analysis reveals some interesting differences across different groups within the sample. Households with insurance come no closer to smoothing nonmedical consumption than uninsured households. Furthermore, and somewhat counterintuitively, better-off households - including insured households - fare worse than poorer households in smoothing their nonmedical consumption in the face of health shocks, despite the fact that in the case of insured households there are no medical bills associated with an adverse health event. Why the poor rely on dissaving and borrowing to such an extent, and do not apparently reduce their food and nonfood consumption following an adverse health shock while the better-off do, may be because the levels of food and nonfood consumption of the poor are simply too low relative to basic needs to enable them to cut back in the face of an adverse BMI shock."--World Bank web site.

Global monitoring report on financial protection in health 2019

Global monitoring report on financial protection in health 2019 PDF Author:
Publisher: World Health Organization
ISBN: 9240003959
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Over the past two decades, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank have been tracking financial protection using household survey data to compare how much people spend out of pocket on health care with their household’s ability to pay. For the first time, this joint report establishes global and regional 2015 baselines for an SDG indicator of catastrophic health spending and infers from previous trends the challenges to come in protecting people from the financial consequences of paying out of pocket for the health services they need.

Performance Measurement for Health System Improvement

Performance Measurement for Health System Improvement PDF Author: Peter C. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139483935
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 751

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Book Description
In a world where there is increasing demand for the performance of health providers to be measured, there is a need for a more strategic vision of the role that performance measurement can play in securing health system improvement. This volume meets this need by presenting the opportunities and challenges associated with performance measurement in a framework that is clear and easy to understand. It examines the various levels at which health system performance is undertaken, the technical instruments and tools available, and the implications using these may have for those charged with the governance of the health system. Technical material is presented in an accessible way and is illustrated with examples from all over the world. Performance Measurement for Health System Improvement is an authoritative and practical guide for policy makers, regulators, patient groups and researchers.