Can Insurance Reduce Catastrophic Out-of-Pocket Health Expenditure

It is argued that for households below poverty line any expenditure on health is catastrophic as they are unable to attain the subsistence level of consumption. Thus, zero percent is taken as a threshold level to define catastrophic health expenditure and examine the impact of health insurance on probability of incurring catastrophic health expenditure. The study is based on a purposive sample survey covering 1,200 households from Ahmedabad and neighbouring areas. Thus, sample is not representative and results are valid only for the sample. A representative sample survey, namely, World Health Survey, and aim to examine the impact of health insurance on catastrophic health care payments for six Indian states.[IGIDR WP -2008-016].