The study has a number of methodological shortcomings. First, because respondents were identified by exit survey (as opposed to a house-to-house survey, for example) the study excludes those who may have required hospitalization, but who chose not to seek care or who sought outpatient care only. Thus, the study may have excluded the very poor who did not seek care. Second, the exit survey was non-random, and the respondents therefore may not represent the wider population of hospitalized persons in Vadodara district. There is likely to be considerable variation in costs between different private hos- pitals, so selection of different facilities may have led to different results. Respondents at any one facility were non-randomly selected; respondents were interviewed during the same season and over a period of only a few days, and patients were excluded from the sample if they had used a private inpatient room rather than a general hospital ward. Third, there may be limits to the extent to which study findings can be generalized to other districts or states, given, for example, that Vadodara district is fast-growing and urban relative to many others. Fourth, the exit survey did not explore indirect costs (i.e. loss of household productive labour time and income). And the in-depth interviews, because they were cross-sectional, were more likely to capture fairly discrete and memorable coping strategies (e.g. borrowing from a money lender), and less likely to capture, for example, small reductions in household consumption or increases in time spent in productive labour.