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Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households, especially poor ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it makes the difference between a household being above and below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents empirical work in the area of financial protection in health, including the impacts of government policy. The paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to measure financial protection.

Chemotherapy --- Community health --- Families --- Health care --- Health Monitoring and Evaluation --- Health outcomes --- Health Policy --- Health services --- Health Systems Development and Reform --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Medicines --- Patients --- Workers

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This paper provides an overview of recent work on quality measurement of medical care and its correlates in four low and middle-income countries-India, Indonesia, Tanzania, and Paraguay. The authors describe two methods-testing doctors and watching doctors-that are relatively easy to implement and yield important insights about the nature of medical care in these countries. The paper discusses the properties of these measures, their correlates, and how they may be used to evaluate policy changes. Finally, the authors outline an agenda for further research and measurement.

Clinics --- Health Monitoring and Evaluation --- Health outcomes --- Health Systems Development and Reform --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Intervention --- Medicines --- Nutrition --- Patient --- Patients --- Primary Health Care --- Vaccination --- Workers

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This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. The authors examine disparities in health status, healthcare utilization, and out-of-pocket payments for healthcare (including informal payments), and explore the impact of healthcare expenditures on household economic status and poverty. Methodologies include (i) generating a descriptive assessment of health and healthcare disparities across socioeconomic groups, (ii) measuring the incidence and intensity of catastrophic healthcare payments, (iii) examining the effect of out-of-pocket payments on poverty headcount and poverty gap measures, and (iv) running sets of country-specific probit regressions to model the relationship between health status, healthcare utilization, and poverty. On balance, the findings show that the impact of health expenditures on household economic wellbeing and poverty is most severe in Albania and Kosovo, while Montenegro is striking for the financial protection that the health system seems to provide. Data are drawn from Living Standards and Measurement Surveys.

Alternative Medicine --- Health Care --- Health Monitoring and Evaluation --- Health Services --- Health Systems Development and Reform --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Hospitalization --- Hospitals --- Medicines --- Morbidity --- Nurses --- Nutrition --- Outpatient Care

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This paper investigates individuals' bypassing behavior in the health sector in Chad and the determinants of individuals' facility choice. The authors introduce a new way to measure bypassing using the patients' own knowledge of alternative health providers available to them instead of assuming that information as previously done. The authors analyze how perceived health care quality and prices impact patients' bypassing decisions. The analysis uses data from a Quantitative Service Delivery Survey in Chad's health sector carried out in 2004. The survey covers 281 primary health care centers and 1,801 patients. The matching of facility data and patient data allows the analysis to control for a wide range of important patient and facility characteristics, such as income, severity of illness, quality of health care, or price of services. The findings show that income inequalities translate into health service inequalities. There is evidence of two distinct types of bypassing activities in Chad: (1) patients from low-income households bypass high-quality facilities they cannot afford to go to low-quality facilities, and (2) rich individuals bypass low-quality facilities and aim for more expensive facilities that also offer a higher quality of care. These significant differences in patients' facility choices are observed across income groups as well as between rural and urban areas.

Health Care --- Health Indicators --- Health Monitoring and Evaluation --- Health Services --- Health Systems Development and Reform --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Infectious Diseases --- Life Expectancy --- Mortality --- Nurses --- Patient --- Patients --- Primary Health Care

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Controversy exists over whether the estimated effects of schooling on health care use reflect the influence of unobserved factors. Existing estimates may overstate the schooling effect because of the failure to control for unobserved variables or may be downwardly biased due to measurement error. This paper contributes to the resolution of this debate by adopting an instrumental variable approach to estimate the impact of female schooling on maternal health care use. A school construction program in Indonesia in the 1970s is used to construct an instrumental variable for education. The choice between use and non-use of maternal health services is estimated as a function of schooling and other variables. Data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey are used for this paper. Standard regression models estimated in the paper indicate that each additional year of schooling does indeed have a significant, positive effect on maternal health care use. Instrumental variable estimates of the schooling effect are larger. The results suggest that schooling has a positive impact on maternal health care use even after eliminating the effect of unobserved variables and measurement error. This paper moves beyond previous work on the impact of education on health care use by adopting an IV approach to address the problem of endogeneity and measurement error. IV methods have been used widely in the labour economics literature to examine the impact of schooling on wages and other labour market outcomes but rarely to estimate the effect of schooling on health outcomes.

Childbirth --- Extended families --- Gender --- Gender and Health --- Health care --- Health Monitoring and Evaluation --- Health outcomes --- Health services --- Health Systems Development and Reform --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Hospitals --- Mortality --- Nutrition --- Population Policies --- Pregnancy --- Siblings