 "health expenditure, health expenses, medical expenses, medical expenditure, poverty, medicine costs, essential medicines")
Out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenses drove 55 million Indians–more than the population of South Korea, Spain or Kenya–into poverty in 2017, and of these, 38 million (69%) were impoverished by expenditure on medicines alone, according to a new study.
These calculations by the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), an advocacy, were released on June 6, 2018, and based on the official Indian standard for poverty line–a monthly expenditure of Rs 816 in rural areas and Rs 1,000 in urban areas–according to a 2013 report of the erstwhile Planning Commission. The PHFI study used
