INTRODUCTION: Financial protection from healthcare spending has become an important objective to be addressed by health systems all over the world. A common strategy used to assess financial protection from health care is to estimate the proportion of the population for which out-of-pocket expenditures made at the moment of receiving health services (OOP) might affect the consumption of other goods and services. To this end, two groups of indicators have been developed: catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) and impoverishing health expenditure (IHE). This work aims to investigate how CHE and IHE evolved in Argentina and how equitable was distributed between 1985 and 2018.
METHODOLOGY: we estimated CHE and IHE measures, concentration indexes and concentration curves for all studied periods. In addition, we performed dominance analysis of concentration curves in order to assess changes in the distribution of CHE.
RESULTS: In 2017/18, 9.57 % of Argentina’s population incurred in CHE using a 10 % of total expenditure (EXP) threshold, 5.81 % using a 15 % of EXP, 4.52 % using a 25 % of EXP net of food spending (ATP), and 1.87 % using a 40 % of ATP. All CHE headcount measures dropped considerably between 1996/97 and 2017/18. IHE measures resulted in nearly zero values. The distribution of CHE was found to be progressive in all periods applying different thresholds. Dominance analysis and CI show that 2004/05 was the most progressive period. However, dominance between curves was only found using low specificity criteria.
DISCUSSION: We found evidence of higher financial protection in the most recent studied period and progressivity of CHE in all periods. A further question to be assessed is whether the lower CHE and progressivity in its distribution is a consequence of an effective public policy or difficulties to access health care.
The unprecedented global context caused by COVID-19 has generated various changes in society and forced the governments of different countries to adopt containment measures. However, this crisis occurs in a globalized international context, where the mass use of various digital platforms allows the generation of a significant amount of information and the study of interactions between individuals. In this work, in particular, the impact on public opinion about the coronavirus crisis in the city of Bahía Blanca (Argentina) is analyzed from the Twitter digital platform, trying to identify the main actors in the production of messages, find out which users having a greater capacity to control its diffusion and measure the relevance or authority in the interactions analyzed using Social Network Analysis techniques. The main result is the fragmentation of information between individuals, being the resulting interaction scarce. On the other hand, it was found that in the analysis of retweets the main actors are not relevant outside the digital platform, while in the analysis of the responses the main actors are characterized by having a prominent role in the political scene or in communications locally.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.