Bringing together health and poverty reduction agendas
Effect of payments for health care on poverty estimates in 11 countries in Asia: an analysis of household survey data
Call for policies to reduce poverty generated by health-care costs in Asia
Authors:
E. van Doorslaer; O. O'Donnell; P. Rannan-Eliya
Publisher:
The Lancet, 2006
This study, published in the Lancet, aims to reassess measures of poverty in 11 low- and middle-income countries in Asia by calculating total household resources both with and without out-of-pocket payments for health care. The authors calculate the number of individuals with less than US$1 per head per day after making health payments. They also assessed the effect of health-care payments on the poverty gap (the amount by which household resources fell short of the $1 poverty line) in these countries.
These methods estimate that the overall prevalence of absolute poverty in these countries is 14 per cent higher than conventional estimates, which do not take account of out-of-pocket payments for health care. In Bangladesh, China, India, Nepal, and Vietnam, where more than 60 percent of health-care costs are paid out-of-pocket by households, the estimates of poverty were much higher than conventional figures, ranging from an additional 1.2 per cent of the population in Vietnam to 3.8 per cent in Bangladesh. The study concludes that out-of-pocket health payments exacerbate poverty. Policies to reduce the number of Asians living on less than $1 per day need to include measures to reduce such outgoings [adapted from author].
