IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/intssr/v66y2013i1p25-48.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Gaps in social protection for health care and long‐term care in Europe: Are the elderly faced with financial ruin?

Author

Listed:
  • Xenia Scheil‐Adlung
  • Jacopo Bonan

Abstract

While public expenditure on health care and long‐term care (LTC) has been monitored for many years in European countries, far less attention has been paid to the financial consequences for older people of private out‐of‐pocket (OOP) expenditure necessary to access such care. Employing representative cross‐sectional data on the elderly populations of 11 European countries in 2004 from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we find that OOP payments for health care and LTC are very common among the elderly across European countries and such expenditures impact significantly on disposable income: up to 95 per cent of the elderly make OOP payments for health care and 5 per cent for LTC, resulting in income reductions of between 5 and 10 per cent, respectively. Failure to prevent financial ruin, as a consequence of excessive OOP payments, is evident in 0.7 per cent of elderly households utilizing health care and 0.5 per cent of elderly households utilizing LTC. Those particularly concerned are the poor, women and the very old.

Suggested Citation

  • Xenia Scheil‐Adlung & Jacopo Bonan, 2013. "Gaps in social protection for health care and long‐term care in Europe: Are the elderly faced with financial ruin?," International Social Security Review, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 66(1), pages 25-48, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:intssr:v:66:y:2013:i:1:p:25-48
    DOI: 10.1111/issr.12001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/issr.12001
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/issr.12001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aleksandra Kolasa & Ewa Weychert, 2024. "The causal effect of catastrophic health expenditure on poverty in Poland," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 25(2), pages 193-206, March.
    2. Nikolaos Grigorakis & Christos Floros & Haritini Tsangari & Evangelos Tsoukatos, 2017. "Combined social and private health insurance versus catastrophic out of pocket payments for private hospital care in Greece," International Journal of Health Economics and Management, Springer, vol. 17(3), pages 261-287, September.
    3. Samuel López-López & Raúl del Pozo-Rubio & Marta Ortega-Ortega & Francisco Escribano-Sotos, 2021. "Catastrophic Household Expenditure Associated with Out-of-Pocket Healthcare Payments in Spain," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(3), pages 1-18, January.
    4. Maria-Carmen García-Centeno & Román Mínguez-Salido & Raúl del Pozo-Rubio, 2021. "The Classification of Profiles of Financial Catastrophe Caused by Out-of-Pocket Payments: A Methodological Approach," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(11), pages 1-20, May.
    5. Samuel López-López & Raúl Pozo-Rubio & Marta Ortega-Ortega & Francisco Escribano-Sotos, 2022. "Catastrophic household expenditure associated with out-of-pocket payments for dental healthcare in Spain," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 23(7), pages 1187-1201, September.
    6. Yerramilli, Pooja & Fernández, Óscar & Thomson, Sarah, 2018. "Financial protection in Europe: a systematic review of the literature and mapping of data availability," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 122(5), pages 493-508.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:intssr:v:66:y:2013:i:1:p:25-48. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1865-1674 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.