Selling Your Farm to Buy Health: Some Things Never Change
Let’s talk about catastrophic expenditures in health
This piece originally appeared in the WorldBank DATA Blog.
Two thousand years ago, the story goes, an itinerant carpenter-prophet in Palestine met a woman who had suffered from a bleeding condition for twelve years. She had gone to see this man because she had already “suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors”—which, fair enough—“and had spent all she had.” [1]
Today, we’ve given that a name: “Catastrophic expenditure for health.”
And that concept — financial catastrophe in health care — feels quite new. It wasn’t until 2009 that we knew that over 60% of bankruptcy in the US could be attributed to medical costs. [2] Globally, a suite of studies done by the World Bank in the early 2000s gave us the first estimates of the effect of healthcare on a patient’s financial well-being. The World Bank started tracking and reporting financial catastrophes in 2017.
It feels new. But it isn’t. Patients have always faced a tradeoff, even in antiquity: seek care and put their financial well-being at risk, or prioritize solvency at the risk of health.
In 2015, the UN formally recognized this tradeoff. The international body now tracks…
