background ghana’s national health insurance scheme (nhis), established by an act of parliament (act 650), in 2003 and since replaced by act 852 of 2012 remains, in african terms, unprecedented in terms of growth and coverage. as a result, the scheme has received praise for its associated legal reforms, clinical audit mechanisms and for serving as a hub for knowledge sharing and learning within...

This paper integrates into public economics a biologically founded, stochastic process of individual ageing. The novel approach enables us to investigate the interaction between health and retirement policy in order to quantitatively characterize the optimal joint design of the social insurance system today and in response to future medical progress, and its implications for health inequality. ...

T H E DECADE that has passed since the Social Security Act was adopted in the United States saw a rapid expansion of social security measures throughout the world. When the act was under consideration by Congress in the spring of 1 9 3 5 , Great Britain and almost every country of Europe had one or more social insurance programs providing protection against the risks of old age, death, invalidi...

Declining response rates to surveys is a widespread and troubling problem. Unit non-response (when a household is not interviewed at all) has been rising in most surveys. For example, unit non-response rates rose by 3-12 percentage points over the 1990s for six U.S. Census Bureau surveys (Atrostic et al. 2001). Many recent papers have raised the concern that this increased non-response has led ...

The following article is a recent bibliographic review of supplementary healthcare policies in Brazil and EU. The main focus is analyzing healthcare policies for the private sector in Brazil, within the context of Brazil’s Unified National Health System (SUS), with the profile of the private sector in European Union countries, which have long had public systems integrated with social security. ...

BACKGROUND One of the main objectives of the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme, at its establishment in 2003, was to ease financial burden of the full cost recovery policy, particularly on the poor. However, currently, majority of the scheme's subscribers are individuals in the upper wealth quintile, as the poor in society rather have not subscribed. We explored the motivational factors as...

Australia's private health insurance funds have been prominent participants in the nation's health system for 60 years. Yet there is relatively little public awareness of the distinctive origins of the health funds, the uncharacteristic organisational nature of these commercial enterprises and the peculiarly regulated nature of their industry. The conventional corporate responsibility to shareh...

The effects of supplemental health insurance on health-care consumption crucially depend on specific institutional features of the health-care system. We analyse the situation in Belgium, a country with a very broad coverage in compulsory social health insurance and where supplemental insurance mainly refers to extra-billing in hospitals. Within this institutional background, we find only weak ...

,QMENDMENTS TO THE Social Security -4ct, passed in 1965 {Public Law S9-97) not only made major changes in the exisbing old-age, surviwrs: and disabi1it.y insurance (OASDI) syst.em but also established t,wo new insurance programs : the hospital insurance program a.nd the supplementary medical insurance pr0gram.l The three syste.ms are to be financed separately and are therefore discussed separat...

Social Insurance with Competitive Insurance Markets and Risk Misperception* This paper considers an economy where individuals differ in productivity and in risk. Rochet (1991) has shown that when private insurance markets offer full coverage at fair rates, social insurance is desirable if and only if risk and productivity are negatively correlated. This condition is usually shown to be satisfie...