Recent history of the health care system The health care system was highly centralized in line with the Semashko model of the Soviet Union. The entire population had access to a comprehensive range of medical services free at the point of access. Following independence, devastating economic and sociopolitical problems forced a radical reform programme which introduced out-of-pocket payments for...

Universal health coverage and healthy lives for all are now widely shared goals and central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Despite significant progress over the last decades, the world is still far from reaching these goals. Billions of people lack basic coverage of health services, live with unnecessary pain and disability, or have their lives cut short by avoidable or treatab...

In 2003, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. We combine differences-in-differences with matching methods to obtain impact estimates, using data collected from program administrators, health facilities and households. The scheme has increased outpatient and inpatient utilization, and has reduced the cost of deliveries. But it has not reduce...

This study projects how much Medicare beneficiaries who sign up for the standard Part D drug benefit in 2006 will pay in quarterly out-of-pocket payments through 2008. In the first year we estimate that about 38 percent of enrollees will hit the benefit's no-coverage zone, known as the "doughnut hole," and that 14 percent will exceed the catastrophic threshold. Because drug spending is highly p...

Universal health coverage (UHC) includes the guarantee that everyone will be protected over the entire life-cycle by a defined set of essential health services fulfilling four interrelated criteria, as set out in Social Protection Floors Recommendation, 2012 (202) of the International Labour Organization (ILO): availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality.1 Insofar as it furthers heal...

The Korean health care system has been recognized by other countries for its rapid expansion of national health insurance. The government's policy of promoting the private sector, relying on market forces for various allocation decisions, and using the fee-for-service payment system has created a number of challenges for the Korean health system. Among these are rapid growth of health care expe...

In 2005, the Member States of WHO adopted a resolution encouraging countries to develop health financing systems capable of achieving and/or maintaining universal coverage of health services - where all people have access to needed health services without the risk of severe financial consequences. In doing this, a major challenge for many countries will be to move away from out-of-pocket paymen...

BACKGROUND This study will provide detailed specification of those variables and determinants of unpredictable health expenditure in Iran, and the requirements to reduce extensive effects of the factors affecting households' payments for health and other goods and services inappropriately. METHOD This study aims to identify measures of fair financing of health services and determinants of fai...

BACKGROUND One of the key functions of health insurance is to provide financial protection against high costs of health care, yet evidence of such protection from developing countries has been inconsistent. The current study uses the case of Ghana to contribute to the evidence pool about insurance's financial protection effects. It evaluates the impact of the country's National Health Insurance...