RESEARCH ARTICLE
Are the Estimates of Catastrophic Health Expenditure Among Rural Population too High? A Comparison of Studies in Vietnam
Nguyen Thi Bich Thuan1, 2, *, Curt Lofgren2, Nguyen Thi Kim Chuc 3, Lars Lindholm 2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 1
First Page: 25
Last Page: 31
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-1-25
DOI: 10.2174/1874944500801010025
Article History:
Received Date: 12/06/2008Revision Received Date: 19/06/2008
Acceptance Date: 27/10/2008
Electronic publication date: 17/12/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objectives:
To describe the proportion of the households that experienced catastrophic health expenditure and to compare the magnitude of catastrophic health expenditure that is estimated from three different data sets in Vietnam.
Methods:
The study we are comparing with is based on data from the Vietnam Living Standard Survey (VLSS) 1997/98. We have used data from the 2001 re-survey. The FilaBavi sample consists of 11,089 households. We have also conducted a special survey from July 2001 to June 2002. The sample is smaller, 629 households, but they have been followed for an entire year with monthly interviews. For VLSS and FilaBavi, re-census survey households were interviewed once with a recall period of one month.
Findings:
In the VLSS data and in the FilaBavi re-census survey it was found that 9%-10% of the households experienced catastrophic healthcare spending. But, only 5% (average per month) and 1% (for the whole year) of the households in the special survey report catastrophic spending.
Conclusions:
We suggest that the major reason for the difference in the estimates is the different data collection methods. When doing a cross sectional study with a relatively short recall period there is a risk that households will tend to overestimate non-recurrent large expenditures as that for health.
