<P>附发该文的评论文章(节选），供大家参考，可惜是英文的，没有时间帮大家翻译中文。</P>
<P 0pt? 0cm><B>Health spending and poverty</B></P>
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<P 0cm? auto>Do expenditures associated with ill-health increase impoverishment? What is the conceptually appropriate way to treat health spending and other non-food spending when the proportion of the population living in poverty, the poverty ratio, is estimated? The fascinating paper by Eddy van Doorslaer and colleagues in this week's <I>Lancet</I> lies at the cusp of these two questions as shown by their comparison of poverty ratios before and after accounting for out-of-pocket health expenditures from total-consumption spending, the traditional measure of lifetime income.</P>
<P 0cm? auto>van Doorslaer and co-workers are careful to conclude that their findings of a substantial adjustment in the poverty ratio need not constitute evidence that out-of-pocket health spending causes poverty. Under what circumstances would the evidence have been sufficient for this purpose? van Doorslaer and co-workers provide two necessary conditions: a fixed overall household budget, and households having no choice about the size of out-of-pocket health expenditures. If only the first condition holds and not the second, because sick people choose to forego health care instead of paying for it, the method would underestimate the number of people whose non-health expenditures fall below standard poverty-line measures for developing countries in the longer term.</P>
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[此贴子已经被作者于2006-12-4 14:31:04编辑过]
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