Arashk Masaeli; Hossein Sadeghih; Ali Ghanbari
Volume 12, Issue 2 , April 2015, , Pages 244-254
Abstract
Introduction: From a long time ago, policy makers in health sector have been attempting to protect sick people and their family against high health costs, and financial catastrophic and impoverishment expenditures. As its primary purpose, this study aims to determine the extent of high health costs, ...
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Introduction: From a long time ago, policy makers in health sector have been attempting to protect sick people and their family against high health costs, and financial catastrophic and impoverishment expenditures. As its primary purpose, this study aims to determine the extent of high health costs, and catastrophic and impoverishment expenditures for informed policy making.Methods: Through WHO method, this study used income-expenditure data to measure the number and rate of household who face high health costs and catastrophic and impoverishment expenditures in 2011; about 19739 rural household and 18698 urban household were used. In addition, fair financial contribution index was assessed for the Iranian context both in rural and urban areas.Results: The percentage of people who face catastrophic and impoverishment expenditures with 40% of capacity to pay and high costs with 4 million Rials threshold are respectively 1.56 and 1.49. Without health expenditures, about 4 % of households live under poverty line and with health expenditures about 14% of the total poor fell below the poverty line because of the health expenditures.Conclusion: Most of the people, who face high costs, have to encounter with catastrophic expenditures. This shows that there is insufficient financial protection against financial high costs and catastrophic expenditures from insurance companies.
