Have you heard the term catastrophic health expenditure or CHE before? You should have as many MSers and their families are exposed to catastrophic health expenditure.
CHE occurs when the spending on health exceeds a pre-defined percentage of a person’s or household’s capacity to pay. CHE has a massive impact on MSers’ lives and usually discourages them from using healthcare services and often leads to a reduction in the use of other essential goods and services. In summary, CHE exposes families of MSers to poverty and economic ruin.
In 2014 when I was visiting India on my sabbatical I remember meeting a relatively well-off woman with MS who was having to buy her weekly Avonex (interferon-beta-1a) injection one syringe at a time. She told me that if she couldn’t raise the money from family and friends she would simply miss that week’s injections. Her neurologist told me that she was from quite a wealthy middle-class family and that her MS had devastated their finances. Does this story sound familiar?
If you live in the UK or another country with a socialist healthcare system you are generally protected from CHE by having free access to healthcare and social safety net in the form of unemployment and/or disability benefits. However, if you live in a country with a healthcare system that is based on a fee-for-service private model with substantial out-of-pocket payments it is easy to see how MS can cause CHE.
Iran is a country with substantial out-of-pocket payments for health system financing. The study below shows that about 1 in 25 families with someone with MS encounter catastrophic healthcare costs. Importantly, the brand of DMT, housing, income and health insurance were significantly correlated with catastrophic expenditure. This is one of our motivations for forming a Grass Roots Off-Label DMT Initiative (GROLDI), which promises to lower the costs of treating MS in countries such as Iran by addressing the unacceptable costs of innovator DMTs in countries such as Iran. Iran is not even a good example as the government has at least allowed biosimilars and generics to emerge to try and lower prices of the so-called ‘innovator DMTs’.
Not surprisingly there is a literature of CHE in many low- and middle-income countries, for example, Brazil. Kenya, China, Nepal, Korea and India. But it is also a growing problem in countries such as the USA in the medically uninsured. Over 60% of personal bankruptcies in the USA are triggered by health crises. I sincerely hope you will agree that CHE is another reason why we need to move off-label DMTs up the political agenda and to push-back on Pharma’s influence to prevent off-label prescribing.
I am prepared to bet that if we studied the economic impact of MS worldwide we would find that MS is a common cause of CHE. Is anyone prepared to take on this challenge? How common is CHE in your country and how often is it triggered by someone in the family being diagnosed with MS?
Juyani et al. Multiple Sclerosis and Catastrophic Health Expenditure in Iran. Glob J Health Sci. 2016 Sep 1;8(9):53778.
BACKGROUND: There are many disabling medical conditions which can result in catastrophic health expenditure. Multiple Sclerosis is one of the most costly medical conditions through the world which encounter families to the catastrophic health expenditures. This study aims to investigate on what extent Multiple sclerosis patients face catastrophic costs.
METHOD: This study was carried out in Ahvaz, Iran (2014). The study population included households that at least one of their members suffers from MS. To analyze data, Logit regression model was employed by using the default software STATA12.
RESULTS: 3.37% of families were encountered with catastrophic costs. Important variables including brand of drug, housing, income and health insurance were significantly correlated with catastrophic expenditure.
CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that although a small proportion of MS patients met the catastrophic health expenditure, mechanisms that pool risk and cost (e.g. health insurance) are required to protect them and improve financial and access equity in health care.
CoI: multiple
