Two key health reform bills in the House of Representatives and Senate include the option of a "public plan" as an additional source of health coverage. At least initially, the plan would primarily be structured to cover many of the uninsured and those who now have individual coverage. Because it is possible, and perhaps even likely, that this new public payer would pay less than private payers...

This paper provides a description of the nature of hospital sector, with an emphasis on private hospital sector, in Madras city. It highlights some of the characteristics of the hospital sector, namely its size, distribution, range of services offered, manpower employed, and price differentials for outpatient care. A preliminary comparison of 35 private hospitals suggests presence of price-comp...

BACKGROUND A central aim of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is protection for all against the cost of illness. In a low income country like Bangladesh the cost burden of health care in tertiary facilities is likely to be significant for most citizens. This cost of an episode of illness is a relatively unexplored policy issue in Bangladesh. The objective of this study was to estimate an outpatie...

Author details Cardiovascular Pathophysiology and Genomics Research Unit, School of Physiology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa. Milpark Hospital, P. O. Box 91155, Auckland Park 2006, Johannesburg, South Africa. Department of Rheumatology, Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital, Faculty of Health Sciences...

OBJECTIVES Parental socioeconomic status (SES) exerts a substantial influence on children's health. The purpose of this study was to examine factors determining children's private health insurance (PHI) enrolment and children's healthcare utilization according to PHI coverage. METHODS Korea Health Panel data from 2011 (n=3085) was used to explore the factors determining PHI enrolment in child...

Let R = Q a2A R a be an innnite product of zero-dimensional chained rings. It is known that R is either zero-dimensional or innnite-dimensional. We prove that a nite-dimensional homomorphic image of R is of dimension at most one. If each R a is a PIR and if R is innnite-dimensional, then R admits one-dimensional homomorphic images. However, without the PIR hypothesis on the rings R a , we prese...

www.thelancet.com Vol 378 October 22, 2011 1457 Submissions should be made via our electronic submission system at http://ees.elsevier.com/ thelancet/ with 2009, and of 8% in the fi rst half of 2011 compared with the same period of 2010. Major private health providers, although comprising a smaller proportion of care delivery than public providers, were also hit by pressure on personal budgets ...

BACKGROUND Current prognostic models factor in patient and disease specific variables but do not consider cumulative risks of hospitalization over time. We developed risk models of the likelihood of death associated with cumulative exposure to hospitalization, based on time-varying risks of hospitalization over any given day, as well as day of the week. Model performance was evaluated alone, an...

BACKGROUND Eighteen acute in-patient psychiatric units in Australia funded a syndicate to measure case-mix, disability and outcome of treatment. This syndicate included eight units in public general hospitals, five in stand-alone public psychiatric hospitals and five in private psychiatric hospitals. METHOD Up to 100 in-patients admitted consecutively to each hospital (1359 in all) were assig...