Household Catastrophic Health Expenditures and its Determinants in Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan being a lower-middle-income country, is always being able to allocate less than or around 2% of GDP to health due to which Out-of-Pocket payments have a very large share in Pakistan’s total health financing. Hence, when this OOP health expenditure exceeds a defined threshold of the Household’s Non-food consumption expenditure then the Household faces financial catastrophe. This research sheds light on the features that can make households in Pakistan more vulnerable to catastrophic health expenses and fills the gap by analyzing the determinants of Catastrophic health expenditures of Pakistan and discusses the incidence and intensity of these Catastrophic health expenditures. We have used survey data of Household Integrated Economic Survey (HIES) of Pakistan for the year 2015-2016 for 24238 households. It contains household information including education, income, consumption expenditure, and health expenditures. As anticipated, some determining factors significantly increase the risk of facing catastrophic health expenditures.