Catastrophic Health Expenditure and its Determinants in Bangladesh

Despite improvements in many health indicators throughout the last few decades globally, providing access to affordable healthcare remains a considerable challenge in many low- and middle-income countries including Bangladesh. Bangladesh uses a combination of different healthcare financing strategies, including general revenue taxation, out-of-pocket payments, development partners’ contributions and others including insurance. Indeed, out-of-pocket (OOP) expenditure is one of the most noteworthy payment strategies for healthcare in Bangladesh and the share of OOP expenditure has been increasing alarmingly from 55.9% in 1997 to 67% in 2015 according to the Bangladesh National Health account (Health Economics Unit and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 2015) which was about 74% in 2018 according to the Global Health Expenditure dataset.