Catastrophic healthcare expenditure during economic recession in the field of cardiovascular disease.

Economic crisis drives many governments into drastic spending cuts in order to minimize their healthcare costs, resulting in an increase of out-of-pocket payment. This causes mainly the most vulnerable social groups, not only in poor countries, to lose their access to quality care and their ability to pay, and leads them in to catastrophic healthcare expenditures. Questions about whether health spending can be catastrophic rise across nations where there is an income reduction, unemployment and serious or chronic illness. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death today. The first cost-of-illness study, which estimated the costs of cardiovascular disease in the EU in 2003, found them to be €169 billion a year, while the most recent, in 2009, estimated them at nearly €196 billion a year. Financial protection measures must be taken by governments in order to protect their citizens, particularly the most vulnerable ones.