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Assessing financial protection in health: Does the choice of poverty line matter?

ABSTRACT: Financial protection in health is an essential aspect of the universal health coverage discourse. It is about ensuring that paying for health services does not affect the ability of households and individuals to afford necessities. A well-known way to assess financial protection is whether or not people are pushed into-or further into-poverty by paying out-of-pocket for health services. Although impoverishment from out-of-pocket health spending is not an explicit indicator of the sustainable development goals, it has gained prominence among researchers and policymakers because of its intuitive appeal and link to overall poverty reduction. Using data from Nigeria, this paper demonstrates that the choice of poverty line matters for assessing the impoverishing effect of paying out-of-pocket for health services. Among other things, the inconsistencies (or lack of dominance) could occur in ranking impoverishment levels by mutually exclusive groups within a country or in ranking different countries or a country over time. The implication is that the choice of poverty line could lead to manipulation of results for policy and for supporting an agenda that demonstrates an improvement in financial protection when this may not necessarily be the case.

SUBMITTER: Ataguba JE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7756704 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Assessing financial protection in health: Does the choice of poverty line matter?

Ataguba John E JE

Health economics 20201002 1

Financial protection in health is an essential aspect of the universal health coverage discourse. It is about ensuring that paying for health services does not affect the ability of households and individuals to afford necessities. A well-known way to assess financial protection is whether or not people are pushed into-or further into-poverty by paying out-of-pocket for health services. Although impoverishment from out-of-pocket health spending is not an explicit indicator of the sustainable dev ...[more]

PMID: 33009711

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Monitoring financial protection against catastrophic health expenditures is important to understand how health financing arrangements in a country protect its population against high costs associated with accessing health services. While catastrophic health expenditures are generally defined to be when household expenditures for health exceed a given threshold of household resources, there is no gold standard with several methods applied to define the threshold and household resources. These different approaches to constructing the indicator might give different pictures of a country's progress towards financial protection. In order for monitoring to effectively provide policy insight, it is critical to understand the sensitivity of measurement to these choices. METHODS:This paper examines the impact of varying two methodological choices by analysing household expenditure data from a sample of 47 countries. We assess sensitivity of cross-country comparisons to a range of thresholds by testing for restricted dominance. We further assess sensitivity of comparisons to different methods for defining household resources (i.e. total expenditure, non-food expenditure and non-subsistence expenditure) by conducting correlation tests of country rankings. RESULTS:We found country rankings are robust to the choice of threshold in a tenth to a quarter of comparisons within the 5-85% threshold range and this increases to half of comparisons if the threshold is restricted to 5-40%, following those commonly used in the literature. Furthermore, correlations of country rankings using different methods to define household resources were moderate to high; thus, this choice makes less difference from a measurement perspective than from an ethical perspective as different definitions of available household resources reflect varying concerns for equity. CONCLUSIONS:Interpreting comparisons from global monitoring based on a single threshold should be done with caution as these may not provide reliable insight into relative country progress. We therefore recommend financial protection against catastrophic health expenditures be measured across a range of thresholds using a catastrophic incidence curve as shown in this paper. We further recommend evaluating financial protection in relation to a country's health financing system arrangements in order to better understand the extent of protection and better inform future policy changes.

Project description:ObjectivesTo evaluate the effects of a government insurance program covering tertiary care for people below the poverty line in Karnataka, India, on out-of-pocket expenditures, hospital use, and mortality.DesignGeographic regression discontinuity study.Setting572 villages in Karnataka, India.Participants31,476 households (22,796 below poverty line and 8680 above poverty line) in 300 villages where the scheme was implemented and 28,633 households (21,767 below poverty line and 6866 above poverty line) in 272 neighboring matched villages ineligible for the scheme.InterventionA government insurance program (Vajpayee Arogyashree scheme) that provided free tertiary care to households below the poverty line in about half of villages in Karnataka from February 2010 to August 2012.Main outcome measureOut-of-pocket expenditures, hospital use, and mortality.ResultsAmong households below the poverty line, the mortality rate from conditions potentially responsive to services covered by the scheme (mostly cardiac conditions and cancer) was 0.32% in households eligible for the scheme compared with 0.90% among ineligible households just south of the eligibility border (difference of 0.58 percentage points, 95% confidence interval 0.40 to 0.75; P<0.001). We found no difference in mortality rates for households above the poverty line (households above the poverty line were not eligible for the scheme), with a mortality rate from conditions covered by the scheme of 0.56% in eligible villages compared with 0.55% in ineligible villages (difference of 0.01 percentage points, -0.03 to 0.03; P=0.95). Eligible households had significantly reduced out-of-pocket health expenditures for admissions to hospitals with tertiary care facilities likely to be covered by the scheme (64% reduction, 35% to 97%; P<0.001). There was no significant increase in use of covered services, although the point estimate of a 44.2% increase approached significance (-5.1% to 90.5%; P=0.059). Both reductions in out-of-pocket expenditures and potential increases in use might have contributed to the observed reductions in mortality.ConclusionsInsuring poor households for efficacious but costly and underused health services significantly improves population health in India.

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Assessing financial protection in health: Does the choice of poverty line matter?

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Assessing financial protection in health: Does the choice of poverty line matter?

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