Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Healthcare Affordability

2023; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-19719-2_5

2191-5512

Ilha Niohuru,

Healthcare Policy and Management

Abstract The cost of healthcare is an enormous financial burden for the government, families, and individuals. When talking about paying medical bills, the common financial resource includes personal income and savings, as well as support from the government. Therefore, this chapter investigates insurance coverage, government expenditure on healthcare, and individual affordability, aiming at understanding the financial burden that the patient may bear when seeking medical services. Among the studied countries, only Algeria managed to provide free healthcare through insurance. The other countries tend to have a complete insurance scheme and have the choice of enrolling in private and public insurance. However, issues like public insurance are often underfunded, the claims take too long to process and the insurance is not reinforced, leaving the patients any choice but to cover the medical bills out-of-pocket upfront. Therefore, individual affordability becomes crucial when people make medical decisions. Thus, in the investigation, individual affordability is further broken down into the cost of a single hospital visit and hospitalization, the average income, and the poverty in the country, trying to understand to what extent a patient is likely to have the financial ability to cover the bills.