The national health insurance proposed for South Africa aims to achieve a universal health system. The best way to identify the financing mechanism that is best suited to achieving this goal is to consider international evidence on funding in universal health systems. The evidence from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and a number of middle-income countries that h...

Background: To assess determinants of willingness to pay for community health insurance among commercial motorcyclists (Boda Boda riders) in Kampala City. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional research was done. A sample of commercial motorcyclists’ stages were purposively selected. Simple random sampling was used to select respondents at each stage.  Structured interviews and contingency val...

Falling medical prices and slowing growth in private health insurance premiums diverted the spotlight from large-scale reform of the health care system in 1994. In aggregate, growth in health expenditures dropped to its lowest rate in more than thirty years. Even at this low rate, health spending grew faster than gross domestic product (GDP), but the economy easily absorbed these modest increas...

Health insurance exchanges are the centerpiece of the private health insurance reforms included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. As of May 2012, 13 states, together with the District of Columbia, had taken legal action to establish exchanges, through legislation or executive order. State implementing laws are essential to the translation of broad federal policies into specific...

OBJECTIVE Rwanda has expanded mutual health insurance considerably in recent years, which has a great potential for making health services more accessible. In this paper, we examine the effect of mutual health insurance (MHI) on utilization of health services and financial risk protection. METHODS We used data from a nationally representative survey from 2005-2006. We analysed this data throu...

This issue brief examines issues related to private health insurance exchanges, possible structures of an exchange, funding, as well as the pros, cons, and uncertainties to employers of adopting them. A summary of recent surveys on employer attitudes are examined, as are some changes that employers have made to other benefits that might serve as historical precedents for a move to some type of ...

Steady growth in the number of uninsured and under-insured has sparked health reform proposals at the national and state levels. With many proposals emphasizing expanded access to private health insurance among the low-income population through the use of tax credits and an emphasis on stable and continuous primary care as a key to improving health care access, the interaction between health ce...

BACKGROUND To determine whether the availability of National Health Insurance (NHI) is associated with a longitudinal increase in life satisfaction among older Taiwanese adults. METHODS This study used data from the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging, a nationally representative sample (n = 3778) of older adults aged 60 and above. Participants were interviewed prior to the establishment of NH...

The private health insurance (commercial and supplementary health insurance) sector has undergone a revolutionary transformation in recent years, both in the number of individuals who own private plans, and in the financial scope of these plans. With these developments in the background, leaders of the Israeli healthcare system convened in December 2012 at the Dead Sea for a discussion on "Priv...