Financial risk protection in health care in Bangladesh in the era of Universal Health Coverage

Taslima Rahman · Dominic Gasbarro · Khurshid Alam

39 citations0/0 files storedPLoS ONE

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Healthcare Systems and Reforms Healthcare Policy and Management Economic and Financial Impacts of Cancer

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Ensuring financial risk protection in health care and achieving universal health coverage (UHC) by 2030 is one of the crucial Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets for many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including Bangladesh. We examined the critical trajectory of financial risk protection against out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure in Bangladesh. METHODS: Using Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey data from 2005, 2010, and 2016, we examined the levels and distributions of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and impoverishment incidences. We used the normative food, housing, and utilities method, refining it by categorizing households with zero OOP expenses by reasons. RESULTS: OOP expenditure doubled between 2005 and 2016 (USD 115.6 in 2005, USD 162.1 in 2010, USD 242.9 in 2016), accompanied by rising CHE (11.5% in 2005, 11.9% in 2010, 16.6% in 2016) and impoverishment incidence (1.5% in 2005, 1.6% in 2010, 2.3% in 2016). While further impoverishment of the poor households due to OOP expenditure (3.6% in 2005, 4.1% in 2010, 3.9% in 2016) was a more severe problem than impoverishment of the non-poor, around 5.5% of non-poor households were always at risk of impoverishment. The poorest households were the least financially protected throughout the study period (lowest vs. highest quintile CHE: 29.5% vs. 7.6%, 33.2% vs. 7.2%, and 37.6% vs. 13.0% in 2005, 2010, and 2016, respectively). The disparity in CHE among households with and without chronic illness was also remarkable in 2016 (25.0% vs. 9.1%). CONCLUSION: Financial risk protection in Bangladesh exhibits a deteriorated trajectory from 2005 to 2016, posing a significant challenge to achieving UHC and, thus, the SDGs by 2030. The poorest and chronically ill households disproportionately lacked financial protection. Reversing the worsening trends of CHE and impoverishment and addressing the inequities in their distributions calls for implementing UHC and thus providing financial protection against illness.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

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

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

References

2003Household catastrophic health expenditure: a multicountry analysis 2003Catastrophe and impoverishment in paying for health care: with applications to Vietnam 1993–1998 2007Analyzing Health Equity Using Household Survey Data 2007Protecting Households From Catastrophic Health Spending 2017Progress on catastrophic health spending in 133 countries: a retrospective observational study 2018Catastrophic health spending in Europe: equity and policy implications of different calculation methods 2006Effect of payments for health care on poverty estimates in 11 countries in Asia: an analysis of household survey data 2007Catastrophic payments for health care in Asia

Cited by

2024Rural‒urban disparities in household catastrophic health expenditure in Bangladesh: a multivariate decomposition analysis 2024Improving urban health through primary health care in south Asia 2022Financial risk protection against noncommunicable diseases: trends and patterns in Bangladesh

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.