Catastrophic health spending in Europe: equity and policy implications of different calculation methods (2018)

As published in Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Volume 96, Number 9, September 2018, 589-664.

Catastrophic health spending is an established indicator of financial protection used to monitor global progress towards universal health coverage (UHC) as set out in Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. It is defined as health spending that exceeds a predefined percentage or threshold of a household’s ability to pay for health care. However, ability to pay can be interpreted in different ways, leading to measurement differences.

This research article investigates the equity and policy implications of using different methods to calculate catastrophic health spending.