Background: Poor health increases the likelihood of experiencing poverty by reducing a person’s ability to work and …

tend to be concentrated among the rich when expenditures are assessed relative to consumption. At the extreme poverty line …

. As a result, official measures of poverty and inequality that treat medical spending symmetrically with consumption goods …, not as part of consumption. Adopting this perspective, we construct poverty and inequality measures for India that account …, are in a state of “hidden poverty” due to medical expenses. Furthermore, while poverty in India fell substantially from …

important implications for the measurement and interpretation of how health payments impact on consumption and poverty. Given … a ‘coping’-adjusted health expenditure ratio, (b) uncover poverty that is ‘hidden’ because total household expenditure … is inflated by financial coping strategies and (c) identify poverty that is ‘transient’ because necessary consumption is …