Measuring Financial Vulnerability From Spending on Medical Care

Rapidly growing medical care costs are increasingly competing for families' financial resources, particularly among middle- and low-income families.  The recently implemented Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for out-of-pocket medical care costs in the calculation of disposable income, showed that if it were not for the costs of premiums and other medical expenses not covered by health insurance, 10 million fewer people would have fallen under the poverty line in 2010. 

Medical Care Economic Risk: Measuring Financial Vulnerability From Spending on Medical Care, a new report from the National Research Council, offers a framework for an additional measure that would estimate the proportion of families and children who are at risk of incurring a high percentage of out-of-pocket medical care expenses, including health insurance premiums, in relation to their resources.  As new policies are implemented that seek to expand and improve health insurance coverage and to protect against the high costs of care relative to income, a measure of medical care economic risk will be particularly important to inform policy.

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Medical Care Economic Risk: Measuring Financial Vulnerability From Spending on Medical Care is available for immediate release at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13525. Media inquiries should be directed to the National Academies' Office of News and Public Information; tel. 202-334-2138 or e-mail news@nas.edu.