in practice it could be defined as coverage for the whole population for a certain set of health services and goods although the nature of these goods and services varies across countries the who and the world bank have proposed options to measure and assess health care coverage in a given country and to measure progress towards universal coverage see box they suggest that two types of measures can be used to assess progress towards universal coverage financial protection can be measured by looking at the proportion of people facing very high catastrophic health expenditure defined as a percentage of household spending and by looking at the proportion of the population who fall into poverty due to health spending