The Financial Burden of Healthcare Cost: Coping Strategies for Medical Expenses in Mexico

Ignoring the means of financing out-of-pocket health expenditures may bring a misleading impression of their short and long-term impacts on households’ wellbeing. Small amounts of health spending may seriously affect households’ living standards. When households reduce their current consumption of basic needs in order to finance their health spending they seriously endanger their current wellbeing. Also, drawing on financial coping strategies conditions future consumption and income. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use and incidence of means of financing out-of-pocket expenditures in Mexico in 2008, 2010, and 2012. We found that a large number of households in Mexico finance their medical expenditures through the reduction of their essential consumption and the use of financial coping strategies. According to conventional measures, many of these households may not experience catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditures, but we found them to be vulnerable to poverty.