Households forgoing healthcare as a measure of financial risk protection: an application to Liberia

INTRODUCTION: Access to Liberia’s health system is reliant on out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditures which may prevent people from seeking care or result in catastrophic health expenditure (CHE). CHE and impoverishment due to OOP, which are used by the World Bank and World Health Organization as the sole measures of financial risk protection, are limited: they do not consider households who, following a health shock, do not incur expenditure because they cannot access the healthcare services they need (i.e., households forgoing healthcare (HFH) services). This paper attempts to overcome this limitation and improve financial risk protection by measuring HFH incidence and comparing it with CHE standard measures using household survey data from Liberia. METHODS: Data from the Liberia Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2014 were analysed. An OOP health expenditure is catastrophic when it exceeds a total or non-food household expenditure threshold. A CHE incidence curve, representing CHE incidence at different thresholds, was developed. To overcome CHE limitations, an HFH incidence measure was developed based on CHE, OOP and health shocks data: households incurring health shocks and having negligible OOP were considered to have forgone healthcare. HFH incidence was compared with standard CHE measures. RESULTS: CHE incidence and intensity levels depend on the threshold used. Using a 30% non-food expenditure threshold, CHE incidence is 2.1% (95% CI: 1.7–2.5%) and CHE intensity is 37.4% (95% CI: 22.7–52.0%). CHE incidence is approximately in line with other countries, while CHE intensity is higher than in other countries. CHE pushed 1.6% of households below the food poverty line in 2014. c approximately 4 times higher than CHE (8.0, 95% CI, 7.2–8.9%). CONCLUSION: Lack of financial risk protection is a significant problem in Liberia and it may be underestimated by CHE: this study confirms that HFH incidence can complement CHE measures in providing a complete picture of financial risk protection and demonstrates a simple method that includes measures of healthcare forgone as part of standard CHE analyses. This paper provides a new methodology to measure HFH incidence and highlights the need to consider healthcare forgone in analyses of financial risk protection, as well as the need for further development of these measures.