OUT OF POCKET HEALTH EXPENDITURE AND UNIVERSAL HEALTH COVERAGE IN CAMEROON: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS ON THE AFFORDABILITY OF HEALTH SERVICES FOR THE POOR AND VULNERABLE

This paper explores how the poor and vulnerable can afford free health services as the government intends to enhance universal health coverage attainment in Cameroon by 2035. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach is employed time series data spanning 28 years. Focusing on Out of Pocket Health Expenditure (OOPHE), Household per capita income (HpCY), Household per capita Health Expenditure (HCHExp), Income tax (Ytax) and Private Health Insurance (PrivHIns) as explanatory variables, the paper explains how long life (proxy to Universal Health Coverage(UHC) emanates from national health expenditures. With adjusted R-squared value of 0.86, it indicates that about 86% variations in universal health coverage in Cameroon are jointly accounted for by variations in the variables included in the regression model. Other results show that the mean of OOPHE as a percentage of total health expenditure stands at 72.7%, which could be very prohibitive to financial access on UHC given the huge rate of unemployment and the burden of poverty in Cameroon. As a result, it is recommended that health policy reforms should focus on optimizing financial risk protection on the poor and vulnerable and increasing national health expenditure as a proportion of the national budget of Cameroon to 15 percent as per the Abuja Declaration. Finally, the reduction of poverty as an appropriate stepping stone towards the attainment of universal health coverage in Cameroon is both a strategy and pathway policy recommendation.