[News] High health expenses in the WHO Western Pacific region

In the WHO Western Pacific region—home to nearly 1·9 billion people in 37 countries and territories including Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea—the number of people who encountered catastrophic health expenses, by spending more than 10% of their household budget as out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure, increased from one in ten in 2000, to one in five in 2017, amounting to 385 million people, according to a new WHO report released on Dec 12, 2023.