ALTERNATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR FINANCIAL PROTECTION IN HEALTH

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Health insurance creates important conditions for human flourishing by keeping people healthy and protecting ill individuals and their households from insecurity, vulnerabilities and harmful deprivations.

The conventional framework fails to address these key goals and to expose the harmful health and financial consequences of inadequate health insurance and financial protection, and the distribution of those consequences. Conventional methods not only underestimate adverse consequences of inadequate financial protection in health, their inadequate representation of risk protection and of costs has the potential to mislead the field away from solutions. It also misinforms policy makers who rely on conventional measures, come up with specious policy prescriptions.

A financial protection profile provides a more accurate picture of how individuals and households fare across numerous dimensions when confronting a heath need. It goes beyond the level of spending to cover aspects directly related to health care, such as health care access and insurance utilization, and examines broader impacts on current and longer-term household consumption. 

A multidimensional financial protection profile can capture interrelated aspects of health expenditure, such as direct and indirect costs of illness, coping strategies used to meet costs, insurance status and utilization, household consumption patterns, and how health costs affect them.  It presents more comprehensively the impact of health costs, highlighting the urgent need for financial protection and offering better guidance to policy makers.

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