Analysing the Effects of Healthcare Payment Policies on Poverty: A Microsimulation Study with Real-World Healthcare Data

Abstract

In Europe, many people experience financial hardship due to healthcare payments, despite (near- )universal healthcare. In Finland and other countries, austerity has further widened the gaps in coverage through increases in patient payments. However, distributional analyses of austerity have solely concentrated on the effects of tax- benefit policies. We present a method for examining how health payment policies and tax- benefit policies affect household income in conjunction to evaluate the total effect of implemented and planned policies. We linked the national tax- benefit microsimulation model, SISU