Incidence of non-fatal health outcomes and debt in urban India

Type Working Paper - Draft Paper prepared for Urban Research Symposium, 9-11 December 2002, at The World Bank, Washington DC
Title Incidence of non-fatal health outcomes and debt in urban India
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2002
URL http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/drivers_urb_change/urb_society/pdf_health_educ/CEHAT_Ravi_Non_Fata​l_Health_india.pdf
Abstract
Poor coverage of any health insurance programme and inadequacy of public health care system has made India a country where out of pocket expenditure for seeking health care contributed to 75 % of total expenditure on health care. Such a high level of spending on health care affects drastically the economic security of the ailing persons household. This paper tries to study the above phenomenon by analyzing the household level financing of hospitalization care services in urban India using the 52nd Round National Sample Survey Data Sets. Data on source of financing for 12,437 persons who were hospitalized during last one year prior to the survey date has been analyzed for this. Results showed that about 25 percent of households were meeting expenditure on inpatient care of a member through sale of animals/ sale of ornaments/ sale of physical assets/ borrowings. The percentage of households falling into debt trap because of incidence of hospitalization was 30 percent if treatment was sought from private health care sector and 20 percent if treatment was from public health care sector. Class differentials showed that the proportion of the ailing person’s households falling into debt increased between richest and poorest subgroups from 17 percent to 26 percent if treatment was sought from public sector and from 23 percent to 41 percent if treatment was sought from private sector. Though the overall coverage of health security schemes are very low, the paper shows how the households covered under such schemes are benefited from it.

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