This three-country study extends the boundaries of traditional benefit-incidence, as just described, in several ways. For instance, it included private as well as well as governmental health service expenditures in an effort to examine the equity of health financing as a whole, rather than only the portion of financing involving the government. It also included the inter-class distribution of the tax revenues used to finance government health expenditures, as well as the expenditures themselves, in order to assess the distribution of the net subsidy (i.e. expenditures less revenues) among socioeconomic groups. And in assessing the equity of the expenditure pattern, it tried to take into account the varying severity of the disease burden among the different socioeconomic groups covered
Because of data limitations in Nepal, it was possible to produce an overall assessment of the health financing equity situation only for Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In Bangladesh, the health financing situation was found to be regressive; in Sri Lanka, it was progressive.
