OBJECTIVES To describe patterns in physician and hospital utilization among rural and urban populations in China and to determine factors associated with any differences. METHODS In 2003, the Third National Health Services Survey in China was conducted to collect information about health services utilization from randomly selected residents. Of the 193,689 respondents to the survey (response ...

BACKGROUND Poverty due to illness has become a substantial social problem in rural China since the collapse of the rural Cooperative Medical System in the early 1980s. Although the Chinese government introduced the New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes (NRCMS) in 2003, the associations between different health insurance benefit package designs and healthcare utilization remain largely unknown. ...

BACKGROUND The People's Republic of China's population is aging rapidly, partly because of the impact of the one-child policy and improvements in the health care system. Caring for bedridden seniors can be a challenge for many families in the People's Republic of China. OBJECTIVE To identify the inequality of income among different age groups and social statuses, and evaluate the medical burd...

Background & purpose: Since 2005, a reform known as Rural Insurance and Family Medicine Scheme has introduced to primary health care network in Iran in rural areas and small towns. The content of the reform implies a substantial change in those aspects of health centers that mainly could be categorized as structural quality. Although, this is the requirement of all health care providers, they a...

More than 35.6 million children were enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in December 2016— accounting for just over half of total Medicaid and CHIP enrollment.1 Medicaid and CHIP are particularly important in rural areas where 77.1 percent of children in households with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) are covered by public insurance...

INTRODUCTION China introduced the urban resident basic medical insurance (URBMI) in 2007 to cover children and urban unemployed adults, in addition to the new cooperative medical scheme (NCMS) for rural residents in 2003 and the basic health insurance scheme (BHIS) for urban employees in 1998. This study examined whether the overall income-related inequality in health insurance coverage improve...

INTRODUCTION The older population in most developing countries are uninsured and lack access to health services. This study assessed the extent to which a multi-strategy health insurance education intervention would increase the number of insured among the older population in rural Kenya. METHODS The quasi-experimental study prospectively followed 1,104 unpaired older persons (60 years or mor...

The focus of this case study is utilizing research to influence policy in a large developing country. Our experiences involve the lack of health insurance for China's rural populations and how our research helped shape China's recent policy attention and efforts on this issue. More than 80 percent of China's 700 million rural residents have no health insurance. This has been the case for the pa...

The test on the presence of full insurance that is commonly employed does not take into account that households also rely on buffer stocks to shield their consumption from income shocks. In this paper a test is developed that deals with this omission. It is shown that in the presence of partial insurance, the common test on the degree of informal insurance underestimates the degree of protectio...

Social medical insurance schemes are crucial for realizing universal health coverage and health equity. The aim of this study was to investigate whether and how reimbursement for injury-induced medical expenses is addressed in Chinese legislative documents relevant to social medical insurance. We retrieved legislative documents from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure and the Lawyee dat...