Financially catastrophic and high-cost cases: definitions, distinctions, and their implications for policy formulation.

Abstract

To facilitate discourse and improve the formulation of policy, a clear distinction should be made between financially catastrophic and high-cost health care expenditures. I propose that "financially catastrophic" be used to describe cases whose expenditures are large relative to ability to pay (e.g., when out-of-pocket medical expenditures exceed 15% of annual family income) and that "high cost" describe cases whose total expenditures exceed a set amount (e.g., $10,000 in a year's time) regardless of source of payment or ability to pay. Using these distinctions, I show how third-party coverage and other resources determine whether a high-cost case or illness is also financially catastrophic. I illustrate the usefulness of the proposed categorization by applying it to several current policy issues.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 101 citations exist upstream.