[Asia] "Poverty in Asia worsened by health care costs’

from the Financial Express

PARIS, OCTOBER 13: The number of Asians living in extreme poverty may be tens of millions higher than thought because estimates fail to factor in health-care costs, a study conducted in eleven Asian countries including India published in next Saturday's issue of The Lancet says.

The internationally accepted threshold of absolute poverty, established by the World Bank, is income of one dollar per head per day -- to be precise, 1.08 dollars a day, a figure adjusted to represent purchasing power in 1993, when the benchmark was set down.

But, say a Dutch-led research team, this formula takes into account food, clothing and shelter but not out-of-pocket health-care costs, which can represent a big chunk of income for the poor.

They reassessed measurements of poverty in 11 low-to-middle income countries; India, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

Together, these countries account for 79 per cent of the population in Asia, and 48 per cent of the world's population.

When the local costs of health care were factored in, an additional 78 million people in these countries -- 2.7 per cent of their population -- fell below the one-dollar-a-day threshold.

The burden was highest in India, Vietnam, Bangladesh and China, and lowest in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

"Our findings... lend support to qualitative studies suggesting that health-care payments cause impoverishment," say the authors, led by Eddy van Doorslaer, a doctor of health policy at the Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam.