At least 150 million people worldwide suffer financial catastrophe each year and 100 million are pushed under the poverty level simply because they need to pay for health services, according to new World Health Organization (WHO) research published July 16 in the July-August issue of Health Affairs, a thematic volume on global health that focuses particularly on financing questions.
The WHO study encompasses 89 countries covering 89 percent of the world’s population, making possible the first global estimates of the extent of catastrophic spending and associated impoverishment. Countries that fund their healthcare systems using some form of prepayment, such as taxes or insurance, were less likely than countries that fund their healthcare systems through out-of-pocket payments to have a population that suffered financial catastrophe, WHO researchers found. When prepayment accounts for more than 80 percent of all health payments, the incidence of financial catastrophe is less than 1 percent. Read the abstract.
