Towards improved measurement of financial protection in health

Health System Financing The financing of most health systems include some pooling arrangement, meaning that financial resources are accumulated and managed so as to share the financial risks of illness across all members of the pool. [...]members of the pool who need to use health services will not have to bear the corresponding costs all by themselves, as costs will be shared across all pool members, making ill individuals less likely to be deterred from seeking care because of health payments and less likely to fall into poverty should any payments need to be made.\n Since the observed (unadjusted) incidence of financial catastrophe due to health payments is concentrated amongst the richer households, and caused mainly by their use of inpatient services, price policies of free inpatient care would likely seem more effective in reducing reported catastrophic payments overall than outpatient care subsidization. [...]financial protection metrics should ideally take other fundamental issues into consideration, such as the long-term financial consequences of strategies frequently adopted by households to cope with medical bills (e.g., borrowing money or selling assets) [17].