This article, published in BMJ Global Health, quantifies household out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure for treatment of childhood pneumonia and diarrhoea and estimates its impact on poverty for different socioeconomic groups in Ethiopia. The study finds that wealthier and urban households have higher OOP payments, but poorer and rural households are more likely to be impoverished due to medical payments. The present circumstances call for revisiting the existing health financing strategy for high-priority services that place a substantial burden of payment on households at the point of care.
This article, published in BMC Medicine, utilizes a cost and epidemiological model to propose an assessment of the burden of medical impoverishment in Ethiopia (i.e., the number of households crossing a poverty line due to out-of-pocket (OOP) direct medical expenses). Among 20 leading causes of mortality, the authors estimate the burden of medical impoverishment to be around 350,000 poverty cases, with the top three causes of medical impoverishment attributed to diarrhea, lower respiratory infections, and road injury. In Ethiopia, medical impoverishment is found to be associated with illness occurrence and health services utilization. Although currently used estimates are sensitive to health services utilization, a systematic breakdown of impoverishment due to OOP direct medical costs by cause can provide important information for the design of health policies toward universal health coverage, reduction of direct OOP payments, and poverty alleviation.
This article, published in PLOS ONE, conducts an extended cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA) of two fully publicly financed interventions in Ethiopia: pneumococcal vaccination for newborns and pneumonia treatment for under-five children. The authors apply ECEA methods and estimate the program impact on: (1) government program costs; (2) pneumonia and pneumococcal deaths averted; (3) household expenses related to pneumonia/pneumococcal disease treatment averted; (4) prevention of household medical impoverishment; and (5) distributional consequences across the wealth strata of the population. The results indicate that vaccine and treatment interventions for children can bring large health and financial benefits to households in Ethiopia, most particularly among the poorest socio-economic groups.
This article, published in BMJ Open, aims to illustrate the size and distribution of benefits due to the treatment and prevention of diarrhoea (i.e., rotavirus vaccination) in Ethiopia. The authors use an economic model to examine the impacts of universal public finance (UPF) of diarrhoeal treatment alone, as opposed to diarrhoeal treatment along with rotavirus vaccination using extended cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA). The study finds that diarrhoeal treatment paired with rotavirus vaccination is more cost effective than diarrhoeal treatment alone for the examined metrics (deaths and private expenditures averted). Policymakers should consider multiple benefit streams as well as their scale and incidence when considering public financing of health interventions.