Financial Burden of Drug Expenditures in Poland

The thesis investigates catastrophic and impoverishing out-of-pocket payments for pharmaceuticals in Poland. This is an interesting issue especially because the country’s inhabitants incur extensive drug expenditures, both as a result of high co-payment level as well as of incredibly popular OTC medicines. First of the investigated approaches assumes that OOP expenditures should not exceed a threshold, which is set at a chosen fraction of income. Second approach takes into account payments that cause “new” or deepen the existing poverty. We find that the incidence and intensity of catastrophic drug expenditures increased over years and that the poor are more likely to incur them. As for the impoverishment approach, we find that pharmaceutical spending do have an influence on the poverty level, however it is higher when we consider relative poverty line than when we analyze poverty in absolute terms. What is interesting, it seems that poverty caused by drug expenditure is very stable across years. Similar procedure, conducted on the sub-sample of retired an chronically ill people brings higher results for both approaches.