Out-of-Pocket Payments (OOP) of Poor Households in Health Care Finance

摘要

Every governments are trying to solve the health financial problems of the poor people. Out-of-pocket payments (OOP) and catastrophic payments may cause households to incur catastrophic health expenditures especially in poor households. By analyzing 72,516 citations of 2000 articles published in SSCI and SCI journals on the health care finance from 2004 to 2013. We plotted the virtual social network to describe the relationship between scholars of health care finance and found out the hot topics in this field. Our interpretation of the analysis is that health care finance research between year 2009 and 2013 was composed of at least five subfields: equity and catastrophic payment, health expenditure, cost of health, health system performance and fee exemption policy. We combine quantitative bibliometrics and qualitative literature reviews to find out the important topics in this field. The solution of protecting the poor people's healthcare finance was that government may take strategy to reduce catastrophic payments and provide fee exemption policy for the poor. This study applies bibliometrics to find out hot topics for health care finance, and provides solutions for catastrophic payment.