Abstract: This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. The authors examine disparities in health status, healthcare utilization, and out-of-pocket payments for healthcare (including informal payments), and explore the impact of healthcare expenditures on household economic status and poverty. Methodologies include (i) generating a descriptive assessment of health and healthcare disparities across socioeconomic groups, (ii) measuring the incidence and intensity of catastrophic healthcare payments, (iii) examining the effect of out-of-pocket payments on poverty headcount and poverty gap measures, and (iv) running sets of country-specific probit regressions to model the relationship between health status, healthcare utilization, and poverty. On balance, the findings show that the impact of health expenditures on household economic wellbeing and poverty is most severe in Albania and Kosovo, while Montenegro is striking for the financial protection that the health system seems to provide. Data are drawn from Living Standards and Measurement Surveys.

This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. The authors examine disparities in health status, healthcare utilization, and out-of-pocket payments for healthcare (including informal payments), and explore the impact of healthcare expenditures on household economic status and poverty. Methodologies include (i) generating a descriptive assessment of health and healthcare disparities across socioeconomic groups, (ii) measuring the incidence and intensity of catastrophic healthcare payments, (iii) examining the effect of out-of-pocket payments on poverty headcount and poverty gap measures, and (iv) running sets of country-specific probit regressions to model the relationship between health status, healthcare utilization, and poverty. On balance, the findings show that the impact of health expenditures on household economic wellbeing and poverty is most severe in Albania and Kosovo, while Montenegro is striking for the financial protection that the health system seems to provide. Data are drawn from Living Standards and Measurement Surveys.

This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. The authors examine disparities in health status, healthcare utilization, and out-of-pocket payments for healthcare (including informal payments), and explore the impact of healthcare expenditures on household economic status and poverty. Methodologies include (i) generating a descriptive assessment of health and healthcare disparities across socioeconomic groups, (ii) measuring the incidence and intensity of catastrophic healthcare payments, (iii) examining the effect of out-of-pocket payments on poverty headcount and poverty gap measures, and (iv) running sets of country-specific probit regressions to model the relationship between health status, healthcare utilization, and poverty. On balance, the findings show that the impact of health expenditures on household economic wellbeing and poverty is most severe in Albania and Kosovo, while Montenegro is striking for the financial protection that the health system seems to provide. Data are drawn from Living Standards and Measurement Surveys.

This paper investigates the extent to which the health systems of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo) have succeeded in providing financial protection against adverse health events. We examine disparities in health status, health care utilization and out-of-pocket payments for health care (including informal payments), and explore the impact of health care expenditures on household economic status and poverty. Data are drawn from LSMS surveys and methodologies include 'catastrophic-health' analysis, poverty incidence analysis adjusted for health payments, and multivariate regression analysis. On balance, we find that economic status is significantly associated with health care-seeking behavior in all transition economies and the cost of illness can increase the incidence and depth of poverty. The impoverishing effect of health expenditures is most severe in Albania and Kosovo, followed by Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro. Moreover, health care costs seem to place a heavier burden on the weakest strata of the population, such as children and people with chronic illness, with serious consequences for the breaking out of the illness-poverty vicious circle.

This Research Topic was focused on provision of novel medical technologies worldwide keeping in mind financial sustainability challenge. An exemplary area certainly are oncology pharmaceuticals where prices have increased 10-fold in recent years leading to concerns on affordability. The objective of this collection of studies was to reveal some of the hidden underlying causes of unequal access to the medicines. Another core issue is the growing proportion of out-of-pocket health spending in many world regions. In line with the joint efforts of the editors and authors we received an exceptionally high response worldwide. This E-Book attracted a total of 37 self-standing research submissions out of which 32 ultimately passed external peer review and got published. Base affiliations of the authors spread across academia, pharmaceutical and medical device industry, governmental authorities and clinical medicine. Their home institutions were situated in fifteen different countries inclusive of Japan, Israel, Russia, USA, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Malta, Serbia, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Malaysia. We frankly believe that authors succeeded to cover important literature gaps referring to these world regions. We solicit global professional audience to put our efforts to the test and read this contribution to the health economics literature.