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Out-of-pocket health expenses plunge 55 mn Indians into poverty in 2017

About 68% of the Indian population has limited or no access to essential medicines

health expenditure, health expenses, medical expenses, medical expenditure, poverty, medicine costs, essential medicines
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The more people the states bring in as insured the bills for the state treasury for subsidising their premium will rise, File photo.

Prachi Salve | IndiaSpend Mumbai
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

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